


Rather Interesting

by bee_bro



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Crack Treated Seriously, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Fluff, M/M, Slow Burn, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, but they're all just kind of mentioned, except they still hate each other playfully, set before s1 and throughout it, somehow... i dont know how that happened, told from Jonah's side so expect your usual villianism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:07:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 24,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23754334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bee_bro/pseuds/bee_bro
Summary: Jonah Magnus realizes that, for some reason, when he comes in contact with weed, Elias Bouchard's consciousness will come into his life banging pots and pans.---or: og!Elias' mind sticks around and makes it his sole mission to inconvenience Jonah every given chance. Interesting consequences follow.
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Jonah Magnus
Comments: 88
Kudos: 311





	1. and so it goes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wiredfiredready2xpire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wiredfiredready2xpire/gifts).



> so i HAD to post something weed-related on april 20  
> this is it

Jonah's background check on Elias would put every government agency to shame, as not only did Jonah scroll down to the very end of Elias' posts on every piece of social media Elias inhabited, Jonah was also a very loyal avatar of the Eye, in which he took great pride and little restrictions. 

  
Elias was... okay. It seemed that the pros and cons of the man were in a very mediocre equilibrium. Jonah would've waited longer but James Wright was a candle that couldn't burn forever, and it was time to transfer the flame. So, all's to say, Jonah did know about the marijuana habits. He'd signed up for this. And when a few weeks later Jonah finds his already limited need for food further diminishing, coupled with a snappiness he's trying very hard to keep in check, he knows it's the cusp of withdrawal. Theoretically, he could wait it out. He's experienced worse discomfort, inconvenience, and pain in his centuries of braving the horrid scape of human suffering. And yet, there are fifty other things that drag his shoulders down at the end of the day like routine shackles, alas the whole business of transferring institute ownership and politely exiting the lives of everyone Elias was friends with (too many people yet, coincidentally, no family).

  
So Jonah acquires weed and holes up in his new, already meticulously personalized apartment on a weekend. He's been drugged in vessels before, albeit usually not with his own hands or on his own volition, and Jonah can swear up and down on every corpse he's left behind that not once, under the influence of drugs, had the owner of said vessel reared his ugly head in blind, ever consuming panic. 

  
Elias, the real Elias, is sightless but still very much there. Jonah lowers the blunt as his head erupts in whining pain and a stream of blabbering. He doesn't take a second hit and Elias soon fades. Interesting.

  
Jonah does not have great impulse control when it comes to 'interesting'. So Jonah waits for the high to wear off, subsequently losing the company of Elias within their apparently shared brain-space. When Jonah relights the blunt and takes another pull, there's the adrenaline of having your life stolen from you all over again, rushing into his system along with the endorphins of a satiated craving. This time, Jonah keeps smoking, bearing the onslaught of what used to be Elias Bouchard propelling pieces of thoughts and fears at him. It's far less pleasant than Jonah had originally planned to get for the evening, but when Elias reaches a tangent of panic with center focus on eyes - and, well, eye-gouging - Jonah can at least feed off the phobia for a few rather rewarding moments. And so it goes.

  
There are bad days and there are bad weeks, where attempts are made at Jonah's life with more vigor than a usual workday would provide, and so he'll find himself lighting up in his apartment and opening the floodgates to Elias' unfortunate but intrinsic existence. Over the course of a very long, very tedious year, the customary blabber and uncoordinated jumble of thought evens out, smooths down, and contrary to Jonah's expectations, calms. The shards of consciousness that reach Jonah are still far from cohesive or connected, but they lose that sharp adrenaline pang to them, dipping more into general confusion. It's not too different from the hurt and confused stare a puppy may give after being kicked... Elias doesn't understand, Jonah thinks, doesn't understand what the hell happened... It's amusing. He takes week-long breaks between each session of weed but the high and the vivid emotional outlet of Elias' prolonged suffering in the non-afterlife purgatory of riding backseat in his own body, well, it's consistently satisfying. 

  
And then it's already two years later and Jonah has Elias' life under very good control, with no more unneeded 'friends' and no more of Elias' horrible, badly color-matched belongings and no more college debt or accessible social media history. And Elias is starting to be... coherent? That can't be right. Jonah's been too busy with everyday things and with counteracting Gertrude's very pointed jabs at his unraveling, but it's nothing too bad to warrant much need for a good smoke. So it's a while before he gets to hear from Elias again- but when he does, what fades into his world with every puff of smoke isn't the conceptual terror of what's been done, but rather, for the first time, words. It almost sounds like someone's in the room with him - albeit there's reverb on it and a great deal of echo, but nonetheless: Elias speaks.

  
Jonah sits back and listens, a bit miffed at the development and what it could potentially imply in the decades he'd planned to keep this vessel for. The longer Elias' voice rings in his ears though the more it becomes clear that nothing much understandable will come from this. For now.

  
It's a whole soup of repeated ' _me'_ s and ' _I am's_ and a few ' _who_?'s. Jonah will one day meet something similar in what will come of Michael Shelley, but that is almost a decade off. For now, Elias is a broken record of existential self-identity- one that, Jonah admits, had been hell to inhabit. Yet, everything's an improvement from the headache that Elias' panic used to be - no matter how much that could've fed the God that Jonah bows alongside. 

  
This goes on for years. If Jonah was any less timeless, he might've missed the gradual shift in Elias' prematurely inconsistent stream of words unto a slightly more well-spun thought process. But Jonah's been around, and two years don't feel like long enough to lose yourself in. So he notices. Notices that he can begin piecing together whatever the hell Elias must be... experiencing? at the same time as Jonah goes through his day. He becomes aware that Elias is much like a constant radio commentary on Jonah's piloting of his body, one that he just has on mute at all times aside from weekends when weed seems like a good indulgence. 

  
Jonah remembers pulling a calf muscle that he knows Elias had pulled not a year before being removed from main access control to the body. And then the next time he gets high, there's an underlying theme of 'leg hurts, compress' and 'careful because again' and 'chances of injury' floating under the standard pain of isolation within one's own head. There's less echo now, less overlapping words and phrases, and it's like listening to someone read a scrambled sentence right inside your head. It's like a soap opera Jonah can occasionally tune in to without any fear of missing plot: it's all the same. 

  
And then, as the century ends and there are fireworks in the sky and the Archives are closed for New Year's, a new era of the 2000s barreling around the corner, Jonah watches the sky erupt with color exactly as the clock hits midnight. He's sitting in his apartment by the floor to ceiling windows and methodically flicking his lighter, even though the joint is already lit and he's several drags into a good, peaceful high. And that is when Elias intones his first coherent sentence:

  
_Why do you do this?_

  
Jonah is ready to write it off as lucky coincidence of words, but after a long silence, it comes again. This time, much more damning than pure chance would let happen:

  
_Why do you do this, James. Jonah._

  
It is... oh it could be 'startling' or 'disconcerting' but really, watching the afterimage of fireworks dance across the now dark sky, Jonah can only pin it as, once more, 'interesting'. Interesting that Elias had caught his real name even though not once had it been uttered. Interesting that whatever fragments of a mind are knocking around behind the eyes, they are capable of formulating and relaying a question. Twice. With intent. Jonah doesn't answer and snuffs the slow orange amber of his blunt.

  
This only escalates. 

  
The next time Jonah smokes, Elias is right back, there in his head, speaking the same way Jonah now sounds, but the intonation is all different, scared. Jonah has never sounded sincerely scared and it's unpleasant to hear such fear in a voice he now possesses. Elias now makes sentences, sometimes at nothing and sometimes at Jonah. Accusations, pleas. Once or twice he promises Jonah everything and anything if only Jonah is to let him go. Classic. Jonah smokes, snuffs the blunt, and goes on with his day.

  
Years. Years, and the novelty of Elias' presence loses its appeal. Jonah still doesn't know why Elias, out of all his previous vessels, is the one that's stayed, doesn't know why coming in contact with weed is what brings him to the forefront of brain activity. He'd like to avoid this in later body hops but hopes he won't have to, if his ritual comes to a satisfying victory and he ascends, what need will there be for some lowly human drug? And therefore, what business will Elias have, existing where Jonah can hear him?

A decade later and Gertrude has finally tested his patience enough times to find its breaking point. Jonah can still feel the punchback of the firearm against his hand, deep in his bones. He drains the petrol and closes the tunnels down. He comes home feeling buzzed on the rare self-induced adrenaline and crashes into his couch. Long time coming, this killing of what all feared, yet this will mean his own ritual must happen faster. The news of Gertrude's death will spread. The other avatars will come crawling out of their fortified ditches. Gertrude had provided him relative safety from the elements but had rained the same scrutiny and general inconvenience on Jonah nonetheless. So he smokes once more. This time Elias is quiet until minutes in.

  
_Who did you kill?_   
_Was that Gertrude?_   
_You killed Gertrude._   
_You killed Gertrude._

  
Jonah sits back and thinks, to hells with it.

  
"I did."

  
 _Why?_  
 _Oh. Oh okay, I see._ There's a pause there and Jonah reels from the uncomfortable implication that Elias can somehow osmosis Jonah's thoughts. _I technically don't... See.. anything, but I see why._

  
"Do you, now?" Jonah smiles.

  
_Don't smile, you do it wrong._

  
"Thought you couldn't see. How do you know I'm smiling?"

  
_Can feel. You do it wrong.... I never smiled like that. Ugly._

  
Jonah sighs, he'd gotten rid of most of Elias' pictures, because really there is a damning difference in their stature and faces if seen side by side. Elias was just so sickeningly sincere. Jonah wonders how he made it to this age. 

  
"If anything, I believe that grinning with all your teeth is not a good smiling tactic." Jonah reasons, as while Elias does have rather nice, celebrity even, teeth, Jonah is a person of close-lipped smiles. 

  
_Wrong, you must look like some uptight victorian bitch. Wait you are...._

  
"I'm putting the smoke out and then I am never talking to you again."

  
_Sure, go on killing Gertrude and other employees and good luck never finding out what I kee..._

  
Jonah sits in the silence and wonders if Elias faded away for dramatic effect or for real. But god are both options bad... Suddenly Jonah really wants to know what Elias keeps and where and it's too vague to ask the Eye about because there's not a hint about where to start. 

  
Jonah stays partially true to his promise. He doesn't smoke for a long time to come, instantly busy with formulating Jon's introduction to the Archives with maximum effect. But, as things go, not everything can be perfect. Tim and Sasha sneak weed into work. Jonah knows this, and it's not the first time. But between the last one and now, they've befriended Martin enough to invite him too, locking themselves into the staff room... Jonah Knows exactly when they realize that the staff room shares a vent system with Elias' office and decide to try and hotbox their boss. Jonah also knows that it's difficult at best to get high from proximity-smoke, and so there's little chance Elias will fade back into auditory existence.... Except his staff is adamant to inconvenience him and so Jonah begins to smell the faint whiff of smoke. It won't get him high but boy does it - for some unfortunate reason - faintly bring Elias into Jonah's life. 

  
_Glad that the new staff hates you as much as my coworkers did..._

  
Jonah thinks about not replying. Continues working.

  
_Nice laptop, fucker._

  
"You know, I preferred you crippled with mortal fear and not like some cocky commentator on my activities."

  
_I'll disagree. It's fun having a stable train of thought again. You know you're so boring?_

  
Jonah sighs and sits back, "What do you want? What have I done to deserve such slander?"

  
 _I'm pretty sure you gutted my eyes..._ The slight echo latches onto 'eyes' and knocks the word around Jonah's head for a while. _Why me? Was I just that hot? Mr. James Wright.... You old twink... What's it like to have a YOUNG good body again?_

  
Elias' bitterness seems to have replaced his anger- or rather had taken the torch for fueling Elias' ranting. The words are laced with hatred, but it seems that he's... adapted? Jonah doesn't have an opinion on this at the moment. 

  
"You're short."

  
_Oh boo fucking HOO, I'm not. YOU are now, I'm just dead.... Fucker._

  
Jonah gets up and goes out of his office to rattle around the Archives in hopes of scaring the crew back to their workplace. He wonders if Elias is brought on by the act of being high or by the mere mention of weed, the latter of which would be rather laughable... the accidental ghost that's sole last connection to the world is weed... distasteful. That and he's stuck ultimately in Jonah's mind- or maybe it really IS a ghost, huh. Just a ghost that's chosen to follow Jonah out of pettiness or some kind of resilient ties... He has to find out. He has to know. Yet at the same time he doubts Elias' affinity to being cooperative will hold up if asked questions... He needs to turn the odds slightly in his own favor... Needs to ensure the least amount of hatred in the prior inhabitant of Mr. Elias Bouchard, the body.

  
So Jonah is on his best behavior for weeks (or well, best behavior in Elias' eyes probably and hopefully). He tries to keep the reminders that he's an avatar of an endless fear entity to a minimum, doesn't terrorize his employees more than necessary... And at the end of the week, he transfers a few thousand pounds to an eye-surgery clinic out of the Lukas pocket - mostly to annoy the Lukases but also to potentially butter up Elias. So when he lights up and takes his first pull and is immediately onslaughted with a very calm

  
_Smarmy bastard. Little fucker. Bullshit avatar._

  
It's quite the surprise and an exceptional letdown.

  
"Okay, what now?"

  
_We're sitting in the same car, I can hear what music you're playing even if I'm not in the driver's seat, idiot. Doing good things with bad motivations... I can see all that._

  
Jonah sighs: thought-osmosis it is.

  
"Would you prefer bad actions with bad motivations? You understand so little... Need not stick your nose where it doesn't belong. I'm not too pleased with your company as it is, I doubt you want to aggravate that with slander."

_Or what? You'll poke my EYES out a SECOND time? Tough luck, I'm fucking safe all up here in the impeccably lonely, great vast darkness of non-afterlife. Sitting here as some stranger pirates my life, slowly spiraling it into rich-man snobbery, all-white tile floors and corrupt morals, impersonating the government, capitalism in the flesh right here! Give this avatar a medal!_

"Elias-"

_Oh? Oh I'm Elias now? You've buried me well enough, burned down everything I was, killed and slaughtered me and now you're making me watch the suffering of others with no end in sight? Make me follow you through your day as you hunt down innocent people and tangle them into your web of lies so that one day they will serve a PURPOSE? You can't cause me more pain, JONAH, you can't do shit!_

Jonah sits on his couch, both a little stunned and - against all judgment - rather impressed. The happy-go-lucky, wear-mismatched-socks-to-work human he'd rather effectively overwritten the life of had just fit a mention - if not the name - of every single fear entity into a rather concise rant. A rather... effective way to demonstrate his situational awareness, he'll give him that.

  
"How long have you been practicing that?"

  
_None of your business._

  
Jonah smiles, "Hm, rather well done. You must have a lot of free time." 

  
_You still smile wrong. And yes I do, you don't smoke often enough._

  
"Mm, I rather like polite smiles, they invite people into conversation less. Anywho, I'm here to ask some questions."

  
_I know._   
_And no, I won't be answering._

  
"You are very... difficult for someone who does not exist. For all I know, this brain could be defective and you are biologically prone to auditory hallucinations. What about a compromise."

  
_What can you even offer me?_

  
"I was going to ask you that." Jonah smiles, "I am your only outlet into the world and I suppose, therefore, I hold the most power over your 'life' now."

  
Elias is silent for a while and Jonah takes a few drags.

  
_Hm. For every question, a favor._

  
"No. For every ten questions."

  
_Every two._

  
"Every eight."

  
_You are somehow worse than you were as my boss. Every five._

  
"Deal. Except the favors cannot inhibit my greater plans."

  
_Whatever. Ask._

  
"What is your situation like right now. You must imagine, I am awfully curious."

  
_Blank nothingness but I hear and feel everything you do. I suppose if your body-hop ritual focused around removing ears, I'd still see and feel, yet not hear. Rather bleak, like a sad rich-serial-killer podcast._

  
"My life is not bleak."

  
_As someone who gets to experience it in real-time, I would like to disagree. Next._

  
Jonah sighs and closes his eyes, "What about my thoughts. You seem to know things I don't verbalize."

  
_Real fucking sadly I do. When you're not talking or whatever, I get like a... um. Seeping? Like your opinions seep into my periphery and shit. I hate it, keep your shit to yourself._

  
"Hm, intriguing. Do you choose to talk only when I'm exposed to marijuana or is it involuntary?"

  
_The latter. I talk all the time. Was testing if you were just ignoring me or couldn't hear at all recently. Apparently you really can't hear._

  
Jonah perks up, "Oh? And how so was the testing?"

  
_Was saying some stuff._

  
"I see you're trying to pull extra questions out of me, what a tragic attempt. What do you do when I sleep?"

  
_You certainly don't do enough of it, is what. I usually slip into something like sleep too. Your dreams are fucking wild though._

  
Jonah nods, happy that Elias chose to be, while bitter, rather cooperative.

  
_Damn right I did._

  
"Don't invade my thoughts, human boy."

  
_Don't manspread your brain cells, victorian FUCKER._

  
"I will quit smoking right now and go stand on the balcony to air out."

  
 _Oh right, about the favor._ Elias immediately changes tonality, _I've got a good one._

  
Jonah remains silent waiting.

  
_Smoke more often._

  
"Excuse me?"

  
_Oh I know you heard that, I can practically feel your brain making the connections- oh, sorry, MY brain._   
_Smoke more often, talk to me more often. I fucking despise you but I get at least a little bittle of comfort from talking to someone, not at a blank darkness. Careful I don't align myself to the End._

  
"I would prefer if you didn't learn any more entity-related terminology from whatever it is you 'seep' in." Jonah, despite his threats, does not stub the smoke, "And I doubt you can redeem yourself in an entity's eyes if you do not exist."

  
_I sure as hell exist to you, you motherfucker. And I'm about to more often too, now that you're obligated to talk to me._

"Sure," says Jonah and doesn't even look at weed for the next two weeks. 

  
When he finally does, Elias is fuming. 

  
_I thought we had an agreement._

  
"Hello to you too. And yes, we still do have a deal. This is, compared to my other month-long breaks, 'more often'."

  
Elias doesn't give him a response and instead throws over a few disjointed pieces of anger and betrayal.

  
"You know I'm right, or is time subjective there?"

  
_I sure as hell hear your alarm routinely, so no. Who changes their alarm sounds to air-siren blaring, I don't understand you._

  
"And you shouldn't." Jonah relaxes into his black leather loveseat, enjoying the rare weekend he won't need to do as much, now that Jon is safely on the route of becoming what Gertrude wouldn't and Sasha is finally out of his hair. 

  
_Okay, well, I suppose you're here with more questions. Nosy bitch._

  
"I'd like to remind you that your ultimate demise was hearing your boss say 'let me show you something' and following him into a maze of tunnels. Between the two of us, you are not free of curiosity."

  
_Cool, fine, curiosity killed the cat, we get it. Watch out though, now that I'm gone, you're next on the list._

  
"Oh? I'm very scared, someone will finally make it through and take me out, how tragic..."

  
_I'm the one with limited omniscience here, I wouldn't know. And were you always such a bitch to your employees? I'm starting to believe we got lucky with James Wright._

  
"They're just... More difficult with Gertrude gone. There's always someone you need to be afraid of." Jonah chuckles to himself, "And I do need to compensate for my new rather.. frattish physiology."

  
_Still think you should smile better. Try, come one, try now. You are my only entertainment._

  
Jonah sighs - which seems to be a new habit in Elias' rather demanding company, "What are you getting out of this?"

  
_The nostalgia of feeling my face muscles be attractive. I don't know! What do you want, you emotionless bastard... Yes I hear you going 'oh I need to make this smile perfectly cold, yes, that is what the situation calls for'. OKAY we get it, you're playing people... God._

  
"Will you shut up?" Jonah smooths his hand down his face, then lazily picks himself up and walks to the bathroom mirror. Jonah knows what Elias used to smile like - visually, that is. "Here."

  
He attempts to replicate it, cringing partially at the way it looks to do. 

  
_Wrong. Your eyes probably look dead. Hah. Topical._

  
Elias isn't wrong. Jonah purposefully squints them a little. He leans on the sink heavily, letting his arms hold him up. It's been a long week but he's made a lot of progress, can practically feel the Watcher's Crown falling together and into order. 

  
He notices Elias hasn't said much. Takes another drag just in case he's faded out.

  
"Hm, has the 'nostalgia' left you incapacitated?"

  
_I'm not sure. I'm not sure I like it. Not when you do it._

  
Jonah lets the grin transition into a full-teeth smirk of sorts. It doesn't look friendly. Maybe he'll keep it. Maybe it'll put enough distance between the new boss 'Bouchard' and the old boss 'Wright' that no one will ever put his identity in danger.

  
_Oh, don't like having your identity in danger, do you? Dumbass avatar._

  
Jonah drops the smile all together and pinches himself, "Don't get cocky." He leaves the bathroom and resumes his position in the chair, noting to dust his shirt off later from the ash. "I have more to ask. A while ago you mentioned I'd never find out what you keep and where, and then you did not finish your sentence. I would like to know."

  
_Oh. I don't remember._

  
The fast flippancy he says it with rather obviously betrays the contrary, but when Jonah attempts to behold the contents of the lost phrase, he is once again left unsatisfied and with no answers. It's been bothering him for so long, he's loath to admit it. 

  
"If you tell me, I'll do an additional favor." He's rather certain that not only can Elias barely impact his life and plans, Jonah can also easily shoot down any potential meddling, as, after all, Elias is simply an observer - and one that is usually silent - in Jonah's life. No control of the body, no access to Jonah's consciousness unless Jonah personally chooses to smoke. A rather powerful position to uphold. Little to endanger it.

  
_Oh? I was going to say I kept something secret under my mattress._

  
Jonah immediately feels some of the pleasant buzz of weed wear off. "The bloody... the bong. There was a bong under your mattress. That's what you.. That's what you were going to use as a playing chip against me?"

  
_Oh, so you found it. And, ha, it worked..._

  
"Only because you faded out with good timing. Don't flatter yourself."

  
_Well, whatever the culprit, my additional favor is that you find a way to have me audibly with you for a month, in a row._

  
"No. Hands down, you have not provided me with anything but suffering and annoyance. I veto your involvement in my every-day activities."

  
_Fine, three days._

  
Jonah realizes he's been... rather played. Right, the classic 'make a hugely uncomfortable offer and then knock it down to what you originally planned'. He sighs yet again. "I suppose so."

  
_Within the next two weeks._

  
"Noted." Jonah will need to better consider what other stipulations Elias can have on his life. Yet, with everything else going on, he'd had limited concern to spare Elias much consideration. So the next time his schedule clears up, Jonah, rather begrudgingly, puts a small parcel of weed in his sleeve, secures it to prevent any incidents he might need to explain in front of his employees, and heads off to work. Periodically smelling the sleeve seems to keep Elias present. Not a convenient way out, but better than trusting himself to be high for three whole workdays.

  
_Oh, you actually did it._   
_Kudos from me, I'll just revel in knowing you can hear me._   
_Wait can you?_

  
Jonah nods, rather averse to talking to himself in a cab like some lunatic. 

  
_Ah, social convention... How I miss that. Well! Thanks for tuning in to Elias Bouchard radio, voiced by Elias Bouchard for a sole audience of one Elias Bouchard!_ He drops the show-host voice, _I'll have you know I start every morning like this, but now it's gotten a rather interesting new piece of context, as you are my sole audience and are also ALLEGEDLY, Elias Bouchard._

  
Jonah sighs and hopes the cab ride will take shorter than usual so he can be out of it and in his office, safely able to reply to Elias and berate him on the already grating commentary.

  
_Damn you really do hate me, old man. I can TASTE that disdain, wow, I'm kind of sad you can't feel my vibes right back cause then you'd have to live with all this hatred too. Cest la vie, yes? Cest la body-hopping nightmare._

  
Elias continues to spam Jonah's mind with irritating about-nothing speaking for the ten minutes it takes until they reach the Archives. The moment Jonah's out in the street he grumbles into his collar, "Will you keep it down? I do still have work to get done, be happy I've gotten the Bouchard family line a stable and respectable job. If not for your potential as a vessel, I would have fired you a long time ago."

  
_I don't see how anything's changed. Elias Bouchard still works at the same institute, still smokes pot, and still DOES NOT have any BoUcHarD FaMilY liNe to make proud._

  
"I know. You think I'd take your body if you had helicopter parents? Of course not. Your family history, or lack of one, was a big pro in making the choice."

  
_You said 'take my body', ha._

  
"You dirty-minded bastard," Jonah sighs in the elevator, "Anyhow, don't make my day too difficult or I'll put on music you don't like. Or make you feel what it's like to strangle a puppy." 

  
There's a long silence.

  
_You wouldn't_   
_Fuck. Jonah. Jonah you wouldn't._

  
It's weird to have someone call him that. Even other avatars stick with his vessel's name more often than not, as he does with theirs... And Elias blissfully does tone it down, retreating to float around and periodically crack jokes at Jonah - most of which are at Jonah's unfortunate expense. But it's... Tolerable. Out of all the things Jonah has to consistently put up with, which include the periodical involvement of Jude Perry in his life, the need to be outwardly civil, Sasha's general energy, and, well, running an enterprise, then Elias' mental clownery that he projects right into Jonah's ears is of the least consequence.

  
_Quick question, why do you wear such tall socks under your pants. No one will see how tall those socks are. Why not be a true man and not wear socks at all?_

  
"What do you mean, you want me to come into the office wearing sandals?"

  
_Oh, the loafers can stay. Just no socks._

  
Jonah finds that while Elias is not the worst kind of addition to his day, he certainly is a distracting one. Jonah sits back and looks at his shoes under the desk. "So you want me. To wear loafers with no socks."

  
_Yeah show off those ankles._

  
"You do realize that if I do that, you, by extension, will have to feel it every step of the way?"

  
Elias somehow manages to project a laugh in the dark hellscape of his existence, and Jonah realizes once more that the auditory specter isn't being serious.

  
_God, you're so easy to mess with, for an oldass motherfucker you're not too immune to trolling._

  
"Sure." Jonah goes back to poking at his emails and sifting through spam. Elias must be paying attention, as he shuts up - which is worrying - and Jonah tries to think as quietly as he can.

  
_Wait did you know that you can like... Sort spam out of your mailbox?_

  
"Hm?"

  
_Like, make settings sort spam out so you don't have to read through herbal viagra commercials?_

  
"As you may have noticed, Elias, I am much older than you can fathom existing for. I have learned a lot of things in the years and I have learned them well. Excuse me if I did not learn how to sort spam."

  
Elias is laughing again, _okay, okay. Go to settings._

  
Jonah considers not collaborating or just nodding along and not actually doing shit - as it seems that Elias cannot see - but at the end of the day (every day, in fact) he does get a lot of spam mail. He also suspects half of it is from Sasha and Tim and their burner email accounts. And so he plays along, being extra certain to project a vague sense of upset in Elias' direction so he doesn't get too happy. 

  
"You know, for someone who is a celestial murder victim, you are rather compliant."

  
_If you are going to complain about my ghost-radio show in the morning, do not remark on my obedience in the afternoon._   
_Fuck that sounded metal as fuck._   
_Your fancy Shakespearean prose is rubbing off on me._

  
"Glad. Maybe you'll start sounding more your age and not like a child."

  
_Cool, maybe I'll rub off on you too and you'll start using a laptop like someone who's in their twenties and not in their two-hundreds. I hate you. Mind you, I feel it every time you google what any slang word is._

  
"You cannot."

  
_I know what the keyboard feels like, I can figure out what you're typing._

  
"I will stop smelling the weed and you will vanish and then I will look up something you hate and make you experience every bit of it."

  
_Sure, sure, like there's something so bad out there it would make me shrivel up and begin fearing you again, Mr. Jonah Magnus who doesn't know what Crash Bandicoot is. Mr Jonah Magnus avatar of an all-knowing entity that needs to Google Crash Bandicoot._

  
Jonah morosely puts on the classic Apple alarm clock sound, 10 hour loop.

  
_I don't like this._  
 _Jonah, I don't like this._  
 _Jonah, turn it off._  
 _Jonah, turn it off I can't even wake up._  
 _Jonah, this is going to wake me up so much I become alive again. I don't think you want that._  
 _Jonah, turn it off, I'll teach you how to do formulas in Excel._

  
Jonah turns it off. They spend the rest of the day communicating back and forth with mild bitterness. Elias remarks on how this is rather similar to on-call computer techs who have to fix people's problems without seeing the screens. He also reasons that Jonah could just as easily look this up on YouTube, and then laughs at Jonah about how he probably CAN'T use YouTube. Jonah threatens turning the alarm sound on again and Elias peters down his golden comedic content. It's not the most productive day. There's two more ahead but Jonah reconciles that Excel formulas will - in the very very long run - cut down the amount of time he takes organizing everything. So it is partially worth it. Partially. He takes the cab home, which means that Elias once more gets free-reign of the mental soundscape. He abuses not any less than the morning.

  
_So I'm gathering that you can know pretty much anything if you put your mind to it. This means you could easily play the stock market game at some amazing rates. That plus you're old as fuck and therefore know shit about history repeating itself, no? Well, either way, why make some rich family sugar daddy you when you could just like, own ALL money? Wild. Wait-_

  
Elias goes quiet for a moment, which is deeply worrying for a forcibly silent Jonah.

  
_Okay, so it looks like all your bodies so far have been fucking twinks. What is this. I hate learning information about you. What the fuck. Jonah. Jonah find a way to talk to me I need to know what the hell goes on in that old man noggin of yours. Jonah please. Was that another pro to picking me? That and my parents ghosting me for my entire life? Jonah. Jonah. Jonah I will begin reciting the Bee Movie if you do not find a way to talk, Jonah pull your phone out and pretend to reply, Jonah- according to all known laws of aviation there is no way a_

  
"Hello?" Jonah has his phone by his ear in seconds, having started this conversation with limited knowledge on the Bee Movie and having beheld far too much about it in a very limited time. "Yes this is Elias Bouchard speaking."

  
_Oh, smooth fucker. Making it sound all cool and real. Anyway. Dude do you have a body-type? Literally a type of body you usually go for?_

  
"This was not my ideal choice, as I've mentioned the um, circumstances made me pick what I am stuck with now."

  
_Stuck with... Stuck with... How rude. I go to a gym for years so some old crinkly man can steal this CATCH._

  
"It is a short one."

  
_Sure, like high heels don't exist._

  
"That would not be... applicable for a workplace."

  
 _Are you saying there is something wrong with a guy wearing high heels? Are you homophobic, Jonah Magnus? I cannot believe I will be stuck with a homophobe for the rest of my life-_ this is followed by a rather... impressive audible keysmash from Elias' part. _You're GAY? How did I not hear about this earlier, oh my GOD._

  
Jonah sighs, "My work is far more important, the rest is simply echos from my human upbringing." Jonah bites his tongue after that comes out of his mouth, realizing he is still in fact, inside a taxi, speaking on his phone. Scrambles for a quick save, "Yes write that down, that's what the, hm, character should say."

  
_Sure, good luck sounding sane in a cab, wait I'm Beholding._

  
"You- you cannot, you aren't- um, you have not been hired by the... same boss as I am working for. You do not have those... Capabilities."

  
_Whatever, it's a smack-ass phrase, I'm gonna steal it, who cares. Dude, no fucking way you're just 'echoes of an upbringing'. God, I was JOKING when I said sugar daddy- For real? Gold digger lookin ass, Mordechai... Peter Lukas.... Wow, whore. Wooing rich men for money, what is this, an episode of housewives?_

  
"You are... sounding rather like what you accused me of being earlier."

  
_As a member of the queer community, I get a pass on calling you a homophobe and a whore. God this is stellar fucking knowledge. Wear heels! Wear heels! Wear h_

  
Elias begins fading out and Jonah would so gladly not sniff his sleeve, if not for the obligations of a deal. Elias fades back in.

  
_eels. Wear heels. Literally wouldn't be out of character, you've been me for only a few years, it's fine. How have you not jumped at the opportunity to completely reinvent your personality? God, if I could bodyhop I'd be a whole different person every time just for the hells of it... I bet you know this but I have ear piercings and I don't remember you using them once. Buy earrings. Jonah. Jonah get out of the cab, buy earrings. Fuck, what is this, I have no clue what color suits you wear but I bet they're boring. Buy something colorful. Like, yellow._

  
"That's an atrocious choice. I will settle on a compromise if you never make me imagine wearing a yellow suit." Jonah gives up on good societal presentation and stops the cab, paying and getting out not far from a street of cafes and a few jewelry stores.

  
_FUCK yeah! Shopping with the ladies on a Thursday afternoon._

  
"I'm glad you're having fun in purgatory."

  
_Humans are great at adapting. Maybe my grief comes in the form of intense bullshit and also shopping for earrings with my former boss, who's also apparently a cult leader._

  
"The Institute is not a cult. It is a well-respected organization with a good track record." Jonah keeps the phone at his ear, so that at least the passerbies on a busy afternoon street don't pin him as insane. He enters the first store he sees to have earrings and on Elias' demand describes the majority of what he sees, touching some on very petulant demand as Elias needs to know the shape and texture. Jonah's planning to not actually buy any, as after the three days of Elias' company are up, he will never have to confront this again (hopefully), but then they get to the row with single earrings and not pairs. There's one that catches his attention and gets immediately approved by Elias on contact. While mildly on the nose, Jonah does purchase the single dangly earring with an eye on the end of a thin delicate chain. Elias rhapsodizes about getting his ears pierced in a high school bathroom as Jonah walks the last stretch home, feeling the rhythmic tap-tap of the earring against his neck as it sways with his steps. It's... novel. He's spent decades monologuing to himself in his head and sometimes under his breath, as when you're very old and one of the only rather SANE (thank you very much) avatars out there, you don't have much people to complain to about the tedious routines of humanity. And Elias' now unabashed vivid presence is very... different from that. His inability to escape Jonah and the situation he's in is also an added factor to how - while being entirely annoying, he is not a threat. So, as all things go, it's... Well, interesting. 


	2. Chapter 2

The second day of Elias’ participation in Jonah’s life starts much the same: complaints about the air-siren alarm. This, just as fast as it begins, transitions into general excitement about wearing an earring.

“Why do you care so much.” Jonah yawns as he puts it in in front of the mirror, mildly uneasy about the action.

_Imagine living with something for half your life, and then a maniacal secretary of a fear god decides to not only remove your vision, but also make you sit there and watch- or well, feel, as he restructures your life and also never fucking wears any jewelry when it’s become as vital to your self-perception as, say, wearing underwear under your pants._

“I would like to make it clear again,” Jonah finally gets the thing situated and leans back from the mirror, admiring the eye as it dangles, “That it was _never_ my intention to keep you around. You, Elias, are a nasty side effect to an already medium body.”

_Medium like in height? Because that can be corrected._

“Medium like in quality.” Jonah continues about his morning routine, setting the kettle and beginning to get his hair into place as it boils. “James Wright was a gift from – and I use this solely as a turn of phrase – heaven. Looks and background wise. You mentioned how after being something physically for half your life you get attached to the aesthetic? Imagine being two centuries old, that aesthetic is going to be far more cemented than an earring habit could dream of. I tend to groom my vessels to fit it.”

_So you were born a twink and then decided to just keep the pattern running? Fair._

“Stop calling me that.” Jonah buttons his shirt up to the top and flips the collar, beginning on the tie, “Having chosen you as a vessel – or rather your body, personality unrelated – calling me a twink extends to you too.” Jonah attempts to put as much disdain into the world ‘personality’ as physically possible. Elias grumbles so Jonah must’ve done a good job.

_I will never deny it, since I am an individual secure in both my body and sexuality._

“How ironic, seeing as that you are neither an individual nor possess a body.” Jonah downs a shot of coffee and goes back to puttering about his apartment, collecting his briefcase.

_Touche. Hey, what did you do to my phone? Wait why do I bother asking…_

Jonah stands up from where he’s rifling through the cupboard for his travel mug, “Stop going through my memories. Last time I remember, you only got a ‘seeping’ information transfer.”

_Last time was long ago, I’m cool now. This is Elias two point o. I am an Eye avatar, I am also dead! I am the End avatar too, wow, two entities, that’s one more than YOU have!_

“Elias, you are dead. You do not exist. You cannot align with entities. You do not possess extraneous abilities nor will you ever. Do not joke about this. This is not how it works.”

_I don’t care, it upsets you and that’s much much more than enough. Found it. Fuck, you threw it out? You threw my phone out? Dude. Dude all those unread messages, I am experiencing the five stages of grief all over again._

Jonah fills his travel mug of coffee and leaves the house, this time deciding to walk to the Institute. The earring knocks on his neck and it’s not as annoying as he’d expected. “Don’t dig around in my memories.” It’s still deserted enough that he doesn’t need the phone to his ear, as the streets remain brushed rather clean of others. He walks briskly, still, years later, enjoying the spring in Elias’ natural walk.

_What else am I supposed to do? I just hang around, getting Faux Elias Bouchard ASMR all day. I need to entertain myself… I miss the days I was just a blob of ideas getting pinballed around in your- my- skull. Didn’t have the concept of boredom back then._

“You remember being scattered?”

_Ding ding ding! You’ve now officially asked more than your allotted five questions._

“When the hell did that happen in your opinion?”

_Oop, one more!_

“These don’t count.”

_Why not? Cause you don’t want them to? Sorry, logistics do not apply to the dead. You’re out of legal influence here, oh Mister Knowitall Seeitall Man._

Jonah can feel a headache coming on that has nothing to do with Elias – or well it does. It has everything to do with the content Elias brings into his life but nothing to do with the actual duality of sharing a body. “Fine. Fine. And this question better not count, or I will stop all conversation with you: what is the favor?”

_I’ll think about it. And also you’d NEVER stop engaging in conversation with me, I’m just too cool. You do not know anyone cooler. You knew Gertrude but then you made sure she wouldn’t be around for knowing much longer and so now I’m on top of that list. I’m still sad about that y’know? She was a refined bully but she made me ginger tea once and I guess that’s why I love her._

“Watch me.” Jonah bites out and walks the rest of the way with his mouth clamped shut. Elias makes this truly very, very difficult. He quickly catches onto Jonah’s new intentions and fills the minutes of walking with so much word traffic that Jonah nearly misses the right turn to the Institute. First Elias seems rather amused, then quickly turns bitter, lamenting about how this is exactly the way his normal days go and that Jonah isn’t really inconveniencing him much – that Jonah might as well just stop sniffing the weed and let Elias fade out. To this, Jonah very pointedly takes a long inhale with his nose buried in his sleeve and shoves his hand in his pocket, flipping the middle finger. It’s rather juvenile, but when verbal berating is out the window due to one’s own stubborn need to make a point, the more traditional gestures are highly welcomed. Elias erupts in more complaining, blaming Jonah of being a bastard at heart and just too well-combed and un-introduced to memes to be of any real danger. Five hours into the cold shoulder from Jonah’s end, Elias finally settles down into a long silence.

This is, somehow, worse.

Jonah’s got it figured out that, as long as Elias is talking, he really can’t be doing much else. The quiet that muddles his head now is almost direct proof that Elias is up to something. Realistically, Jonah reasons as he clears his new spam folder, there is nothing that Elias could find that would be of any real-world consequence. He does not have access to anything outside of Jonah’s ears – and even that is limited to Jonah’s choice of drug. This is far from comforting and Jonah is bitter that it’s not the first time he’s repeating the same line of logic to himself. That no, Elias is a safe no matter how much information he can leech. After all, one way or another, it will not be leaving their shared headspace. Jonah keeps repeating this. Jonah also realizes that while nothing Elias finds can be truly dangerous to Jonah’s position, he sure can spend the next very long two days clowning Jonah about it.

He hates whatever random variable had landed him in this situation. Also wonders if James and his predeceasing vessels had kept their consciousness too, and that he’d just never discovered it. Jonah sits back in his chair to Behold it, when Elias picks a suspiciously well-timed moment to make the smallest of noises.

_Huh._

Jonah almost barks out a _what_ but stops himself, eyes snapping open to stare at the wall. Nothing follows. Okay. Maybe Elias found something. Whatever. He begins to open knowledge’s floodgates once more, and there it comes again: a soft _‘hmmm’_ from Elias’ side. Jonah’s starting to suspect that it is very much indeed purposeful. Which wouldn’t be too surprising but would be a whole lot inconvenient all the same. He resolutely decides to not fall for it, and Beholds once more-

_Interesting._

Either Elias is digging through Jonah’s head with very good timing or two can play this game. Both options are unfortunate and so Jonah decides that any time is a good time to stalk about the Archives and instill general unease in his employees. This goes – almost regrettably – uneventfully. Elias remains quiet, Jonah doesn’t crack either. If he can keep this up for long enough, Elias would’ve effectively wasted a perfectly good day of being heard, and wouldn’t that just be fucking miserable? Absolutely. Maybe a bit more up the Lonely’s alley, but Jonah guesses he could benefit from the potential pain of being seen but not appreciated… One way or another. He drops in to check on Jon (sleeping on his desk), then on the assistant office, where Tim quickly hides a handful of throwing darts and Sasha stands very pointedly in front of something on the wall, which is clearly a dartboard and clearly has someone’s face color-printed and taped onto it. Jonah makes it very clear he’s noticed but doesn’t comment and leaves after a few too many tense seconds. He makes two more circles around the Archives, returns to his desk, and sits down, hyper-aware of the creak his chair provides and the audible click of his throat as he swallows.

Well. Might as well get some work done. He sniffs at his sleeve once more and sets in to making the monthly finances spreadsheet. It’s a methodic and time-taking activity but Jonah doesn’t necessarily hate it. Coming from several lifetimes of doing the same thing by hand and, to boot, with ink, this is such a drastic improvement that he still cannot get enough of Microsoft. Copy paste copy paste. Then Jonah Receives information about a cage being chewed through in artifact storage. The building’s lights go out. He’s halfway out of his chair when they ripple back on- the safety generator that he has three of, for back up, coming to life. Jonah leaves his office rather calmly, trots down the stairs, observes as the artifact team rile the flesh-thing back into another cage. Elias is, once more, silent through all this, even if the situation must be rather confusing from sounds-only. Jonah itches to know what the hell could be so interesting in his own memories for Elias to shut up and dig through them, so immersed as to not even peep up. Or maybe he’s bluffing and just playing the silent game. It’s infuriating. Jonah didn’t become an avatar of the Eye to just not know.

When he returns to his office, the spreadsheet is gone. Jonah stares at the desktop, well aware he had not saved the draft. He also did not become an avatar of the Eye to ever be caught off guard by such trivial things are power outage. But alas. He sighs, massaging his forehead, ready to just redo the entire thing.

_Click on File. Top left._

It’s almost startling. Jonah does, more out of surprise than will.

_Click on Open, there should be a Recent Workbooks option, hit that._

Jonah does, scanning the page until Elias provides further instruction: _At the bottom, there should be a Recover Works or whatever available, then look for what you didn’t save._

It really is there, the finances spreadsheet. And after that, the silence becomes almost trivial. Jonah, for all his life, can barely remember why he’s started to ghost Elias at all.

“Thank you.”

 _Mm, if I didn’t know about that backup then I would’ve been for sure fired by now. Huh, guess it could’ve saved my life._ Elias somehow delivers this with the exact intonation of a shrug.

“What were you… doing earlier? And yes you can count this as one of your designated questions.”

_Oh? Nothing. I was just sitting here in my sad nothingness and being sad because my jokes are not appreciated by the only member of the crowd that came to see my standup. Hey, maybe I’m the bad karma you’ve accumulated from bodyhacking like six people now. Y’know? Cheat death but land a good little old me in your head for the rest of forever._

“Several things off about that.” Jonah saves the draft this time, just in case, “One, I did not come to see your standup, I came to have a good night out and some asshole decided to get on stage and talk for three hours straight – if we follow your established metaphor. Second, I do not think that is how Karma works. In fact, I _know_ it is not how Karma works. Thirdly, I am not taxed with your company for the rest of forever, but rather for once every two to three weeks for the next few decades at best.”

_Bla, bla, bla look at this guy talking to himself in an office, god can you shut up for a moment I literally don’t care, let me have fun. Also I have my one favor._

“Mm, I am trembling in my boots.”

_In your sockless loafers, you mean._

“I am wearing socks.”

_Boring ones probably. Boring old-man socks, black with like maybe a stripe at the top that go up far too high._

“Maybe they’re not black, how can you know? Maybe all this time I have been wearing a yellow suit and hot pink socks.”

Elias is silent for long enough that it’s clear he cannot be one hundred percent sure Jonah isn’t joking.

_I am. Fairly certain they are not. Do not put doubt in the mind of a blind man, you are literally so horrible. Anyway. On the topic of my request, even if you do not have me unmuted, I request to listen to either radio or current-news podcasts at least once a day for two hours._

“Don’t play that over-estimation trick with me again, Elias. I fall once, I will not fall twice.” Jonah sighs, “What was the time you originally wanted?”

_Maybe forty minutes._

“What genre are you going to subject me to? I have limitations, and so does my patience.”

_I wanna be up to date. You can just behold shit but I can only behold YOUR shit which is all sad white man history. I wanna know what’s up NOW! Give me politics! Give me new movie release news! All I hear is the clacking of your keyboard and your employees laughing at your dumb haircut probably._

“If I cannot hear my employees complain, neither can you.”

_I can! Your brain – my brain – filters it out when you’re reading or whatever, but I get all that sexy sexy un-hinged sound you don’t hear! I get to experience all sorts of weird shit that I expect you to react to and then you just… keep looking at IKEA catalogues or whatever. The shiny paper magazines. What are those? I can feel them when you hold them._

“Science magazines. I do not read IKEA catalogues. I suppose you don’t mind if I have a say in which podcast I too have to experience in the morning? Oh right, you don’t get a say at all, your say’s been wasted on asking for them, none left for picking which.” Jonah retrieves his packed lunch and behind methodically picking at the tiramisu.

_You’re just being mean on purpose now. Hey what day is it?_

“You just said it was Thursday yesterday, I’d assume you could deduce the answer.”

_Good snack. And no, I was guessing. Shit, did I guess right? Fucking stellar of me, wow. Got any plans?_

Jonah sinks a bit further into his chair, briefly mentally checking in on artifact storage to see they’ve got it under control. “Having tracked me for over a decade, I hope you’ve somehow gathered by now that I do not partake in the same Friday activities you might have.”

_You’re fratboy shaming again. And I’ve only been sentient for like half of that. Not even mentioning emotionally stable enough to pay attention._

“It’s well deserved. And I severely doubt you’re emotionally stable _now_.”

_Uncalled for. And I suppose that’s a no for plans?_

“Yes.”

_Wait so is it a yes-_

“It is a yes to that it is a no, I do not have plans.” Jonah sits up, disregarding the ridiculous notion of arguing at empty air in his office. “I do not have plans aside from working and then going home.”

_Boring… Take me to the plaza._

“I am not going to the plaza.”

_Noooo you’re just like a taxi. You’re responsible for me, take me to the plaza. Your own fucking fault picking this body to inhabit… god what a dumbass move. Hey, if you go the plaza after work I’ll almost be agreeable tomorrow._

“What are the ramifications of ‘almost agreeable’?”

_I won’t make it my very specific goal to drive you up the wall with chatter or, equally effective, with silence._

Jonah goes to the mall after work.

_Aw, fuck I know exactly where we are, I would never mistake that smell of stale hotdog from the fake Italian place-_

“You-” Jonah pulls out his phone, remembering the drawbacks of crowded areas, “You have never been here before.”

_Let me have some fun. God, is it fun to know so much shit about me? Stalker much?_

“My job and alignment circulate around the aforementioned activity, so yes.”

_Alignment… What are you a DnD character…Anyway, let’s buy shoes._

“I have enough shoes.” Jonah aimlessly makes his way down the mall, not really one for visiting such… he doesn’t want to say ‘plebian’ but he can’t not. Such plebian places. He’d much rather custom order clothes and cook his own food. But Elias is dispelling vague joy at the smells and sounds of someplace he must’ve missed the concept of, so Jonah lets it slide for now.

_You may have enough shoes, but my body, as you have previously noted, does not have enough inches._

There’s a pause that Jonah can almost tell the direction behind. Elias doesn’t disappoint and immediately switches tracks into innuendo, claiming that there’s inches missing in height and not anywhere else in the body. Jonah doesn’t comment because he’s above lowly humor and abstains from focusing on human physiology too much.

“Hypothetically, what shoes do you mean.”

_Have you ever worn high heels before?_

“In my time, it was part of male fashion, so I suppose I have.”

_Boring. Okay, so let’s settle for something not too severe but also a bit sexy, like, not some doll-lookin shoes. Like a thinner heel… But not tall, I don’t want to feel the pain of twisting my ankle all over again without being able to do shit about it._

“You’re jumping onto the possibility that I am buying heels real fast there.” Jonah wrinkles his nose, “I’m starting to sound like you, this is abhorrent. I meant to say that your assumption I will purchase heels far precedes my confirmation of it.”

_This is my very mild, very anti-climactic reprise after a decade of sitting on my hands and listening to your sophisticated bullshit, let a man live. As much as he… can. I miss heels! I miss feeling tall!_

“You never wore heels to the workplace.”

_Did too! Unobservant motherfucker._

That hurts much more than Jonah will ever let on. He quickly fact-checks Elias’ claim and finds it so damningly true that he promises to dig up Elias the slowest, most boring podcasts ever. As Jonah enters the first shoe store he sees, he inquires about any color preferences.

_Lime green, of course._

“I’m going with black.”

He ends up having to set his phone down, which Elias feels and immediately gets upset over, quickly dishing out news about a one-tap-means-no and two-taps-mean-yes system. He asks if Jonah’s got the ‘ _very complex and definitely original system’_ down and Jonah begrudgingly taps twice against his thigh, Elias cheers.

Jonah hangs around the loafers section for far too long, unironically dragged in by his ever-hunger need to look at options, even when his shoe-shelf at home begs to not be expanded on. The closer to the end of the selection that Jonah draws, the more he dreads what’s to come: having to very decisively turn around and look at the female side of the shoe store and find heels, because- hm, he does not know why. That is annoying. Elias’ banter in his head is mildly less so, as it’s just a running, very ignorable commentary on the gratification of being a few centimeters taller. The rack ends. Jonah needs to cross the store. He locks up, staring at the last pair of loafers, gaudy blue and with tassels. Elias seems to come to an interrupted stop in his unasked-for monologue:

 _Yoooo_ , _what’s going on, you see something you like? Dude I can feels those feets not movin, what are we looking at? Jonah? C’mon, you see something you like?_

Jonah relents and taps out a _no._ Finds it kind of hard to elaborate and leaves the shoe store. This is all done to a very unpleasant soundtrack of Elias repeating _what the fuck is going on?_ In his head on loop. He stops speed walking a few stores down, realizing he must look like a shoplifter with the pace he’s going. Elias rattles around his brain, begging to be answered and Jonah taps out a quick _no_ once more and exits the mall, hailing a cab which he knew where to look for. He sits in the seat bolt upright, which isn’t too strange for him, but he’s tense, Elias must feel it too. He stops the ramble of _Jonah, Jonah, Jonah, Jonah, what is going on._ And instead quiets down, blessedly swimming somewhere in Jonah’s periphery with a vague sense of confusion and curiosity. Like a kicked puppy, Jonah remembers out of nowhere and quickly stomps the thought out, knowing full well that Elias is just a dramatic bitch and no one kicked him.

They’re maybe a few blocks away from Jonah’s home when Elias pokes back into existence. Jonah realizes he’s been sniffing his sleeve on autopilot for quite some time now.

_Hey, did you, hm, stop browsing before you reached the heel section?_

Jonah contemplates not answering and then ignoring this ever happened, but his fingers tap-tap against his knee.

 _Damn, Jonah this silence feels a whole new different from this morning, like that was a joke and all but, uuh._ Elias somehow sighs without access to lungs, or, well, produces the sound of sighing, _does it have something to do with actively being seen browsing high heels._

Jonah doesn’t answer because that’d be ridiculous. It’d be downright laughable if one of the oldest successful avatars would just have a minor, very self-contained breakdown in the middle of a plebian shopping mall looking at sub-par priced shoes because it’s one thing sucking cock to fund an institute and it’s another buying heels where there are cameras and people _watching._ Jonah didn’t become Eye-aligned just through morbid curiosity. All avatars start with the fear of their own Entity. Elias doesn’t pipe up after that as well, fading once more into the back of Jonah’s awareness, even as he smells his sleeve dutifully and without much mind paid. 

They get home void of more interaction. It’s late and Jonah showers briefly but ferociously, as if the stink of those mall hotdogs can pointedly dampen his social status. Then he makes some basic salad, chopping all the vegetables rather faster and with more force than either needed or safe. Eats it in silence, reading one of his science magazines and doesn’t let the IKEA catalogue jab resurface in his recollection of the day. He falls asleep fast and effortless, as you don’t go two hundred years dealing with some of the worst angles of humanity without developing some tricks on knocking oneself out without ruminating in the day’s proceedings. And so concludes the second day of Elias’ guaranteed presence in the life of Jonah Magnus. He is a wrench in the smooth kegs of ironed out routine yet he is thankfully unobtrusive as the night takes its hold.

Jonah Magnus dreams of a pit of partially-people in which he lies, all are dead and he awaits for the dream to become lucid enough so that he can clamber out of the unmoving crowd. It takes a while, as usual, and so he has to watch the lack of a sky, knowing full well that where he is now is very one-dimensional, but that when he stands up, he will force it to unfold from itself and gain a depth of field to accommodate for his vantage point of higher ground. Waits as faces flicker on and off in the bodies that cushion his leisurely wait. They’re all new, faces he’s seen sometime earlier, that he hasn’t learned all there is to know of yet. It’s a mass, a big one, that he will need to pick through and dissect, turning their stories into pages on books that he will wake up and know never existed to lie in his hands: only ones he’s written and read over and over, obsessively, about random individuals he will never meet again. He had watched Barnabas lose himself and had done nothing more. And now he will never stop, watching people’s histories and their futures, and writing it all down in his dream’s books, and then he can wake up and know all the same, that the faces, in their whiplash dodging in his periphery have names, fears, stories upon stories, and it is such a delicious, refined sonder that Jonah smiles- a teeth kind of smile, and finally regains lucidity within his slumber, lifting his head from the pit of strangers:

There is someone standing outside the edge.

The pit is vast and it is hard to see who, and sitting on his expanse of bodies to be picked apart and recorded, Jonah Magnus is suddenly so bizarrely uncomfortable of being confronted by someone who still stands, clothed and with the proper amount of limbs, and some hair and definitely a normal human face – one that is _too bloody far away to see._ It is the fear of being not only watched, Jonah Magnus Understands, but it is of being watched doing what he was about to – watched feeding on the lives of strangers – familiarizing himself with their personal tragedies – it is the fear of being watched and collaterally, fully, understood.

He wakes up.

It is the third day of Elias’ hovering in an audible capacity. And yet, Jonah goes about his routine uninterrupted. He briefly worries that somehow, through overexposure perhaps, the whole weed summoning had worn off. It’s a silly notion, but at the same time, _being_ summoned by weed at all is equally ridiculous. Jonah stupors on why the hell Elias – who even when alive and not bored out of his mind was a chatterbox – is suddenly rather absent, and goes through the motions of getting ready for work before he realizes it is a Saturday. The entire situation has rendered him rather disjointed, it seems. If Elias-the-consciousness is to remain a part of his experience inhabiting Elias-the-body, then this will become a rather hefty problem. Jonah, at the end of the day, can afford to bodyhop again – _technically so –_ even though it would pose for a whole lot of conditioning and subsequent legalities, as well as familiarization with the employees. So, of course, it is not worth it. It cannot be worth it. He can stay Elias for now – and that means, _with_ Elias as well.

He pulls out a pair of rarely used earbuds and goes through the process of downloading Spotify on his phone after a quick Beholding of app options. Theoretically, Jonah is very aware that a lot of his success and the slow accumulation of power comes from using it daily on rather diminutive tasks – not something a lot of the avatars can feasibly do throughout the day. Sure, Rayner can sit with the lights off all he wants, but that’ll only take him so far before getting old. Jonah turns on some random world update podcast and sticks his earbuds in, quickly tuning it out. He doesn’t like being spoon-fed knowledge by someone else. That’s his job.

He retrieves his laptop – a recent gift from the Lukas family that he doubts they picked or knew anything about, simply telling one of their multiple accountants to find something for this ‘Elias Bouchard’ that cost an allotted amount of money and made them look good. He starts going through his tabs of online shops. The podcast episode is fifty-three minutes and Jonah tunes back in on the closing jingle, having already ordered his weekly groceries as well as whatever else struck his fancy, as always picking the fastest delivery and then closing everything. He shuts his phone off too and notes how Elias is radiating rather pleased energy. It’s gotten much more trackable in the last few months. The continued manifestation of Elias in his life is far, apparently, from over.

_Thank you._

“You’re welcome.”

_And sorry.  
Shit. Hm. On one hand, I really don’t want to apologize to you because you have indeed been the sole point for my life’s destruction and end. And I hate you for doing you transplant surgery wrong enough that I’m still around for whatever reason since I recon just dying would’ve been less hassle than getting ping-ponged around the great Nothing by my own thoughts. _

“I’m not… awaiting for an apology, if you are trying to appease me.”

_I’m not, shut up you old wrinkly fucker, the real king is talking right now. What I mean is that you deserve no respect from me, even though you have… significantly improved my living conditions and financial situation at the expense of my life and freedom, and have been rather… patient with my bullshit – for which I will not excuse myself, as I am endlessly and insatiably bored all the time now – but uh- shit where was I going. Right fuck you, but sorry for pushing you out of your comfort zone._

“You didn’t really.” Jonah runs a hand through his hair. It’ll need a trim soon. “I am a highly respected avatar of one of the more omnipotent gods. Countless have fallen beneath my eye and I have never flinched at the pain I wreck for I crave it more than food. I have no need for pity or apology.”

_Yeah, I know._

“Especially from you.”

_Yeah._

“Yeah. I mean, yes. Yes.”

_Okay. I still hate you by the way, this isn’t like a peace treaty._

“Likewise. I am greatly inconvenienced by your continued involvement in my life.”

And it’s like things… go back to an almost-normal. In the grand scheme of centuries, this is the most outlandish event in a long series of rather more severe and bloodshed related streaks in Jonah’s life. Yet this takes the cake for being the more unpredictable turnout of his existence. Saturday doesn’t pass eventfully at all, Jonah mostly cooks himself a week worth of meals, as there’s a nagging feeling that with every day the population of worms under the institute grows more than he will potentially be able to keep a state of organization over. Hence, Jonah doubts the amount of free time to cook that will crop up in the following future, and explains to Elias the history of the dishes in the making on polite request.

_I’m glad I haven’t lost my sense of taste, or smell really. Why do you cook your own stuff?_

“Old habits. Really old.”

_Ooo, sorry keep forgetting you’re old and paranoid about BPA or something._

“I’m not, nor should you be judging my good care of this body, as it is, after all, yours.” Jonah chops carrots.

_No it isn’t! I’ve been bodiless for a third of my life now, which sure as hell matters. You’re the sole owner and I can bash you on never eating McDonalds for all I want!_

“Fine, not your body, _our_ body. You have to feel it too if I get heartburn.” Jonah frowns at the knife and moves on to chopping tomatoes. “Haven’t yet but you’re stuck here as long as I am. Better make the ride less bumpy.”

 _Yeah talk about a good ride…_ Elias trails off, almost so wistful it’s annoying.

“Cut it out.”

On Sunday, Jonah wakes up and does not smell weed – which is an admittedly horrible sentence to have to comprehend. He massages his temples, chasing away some aftertastes of the rare feeling of being watched without knowing the watcher – as it is usually the Eye, something he’s rather familiar with, and yet this time replaced by a far off figure, walking the expanse of unreachable land. He contemplates the lack of auditory traffic in his life and puts on another episode of the same podcast, beginning to go about his skincare routine. Half past noon, the majority of what he’s ordered arrives, and Jonah sorts all the food into the fridge and freezer, alongside pre-cooked meals for the upcoming hell.

That leaves him with one still packaged box and so he retrieves his stash and takes a sniff, feeling like the dumbest avatar alive. He’s glad that none of his rivals have the same mind-reading abilities as the Eye and therefore cannot incriminate him easily for such tomfoolery.

Elias fades in with an immediate rise in volume.

_What’s UP, welcome back to clowntown BOYS._

“I’d prefer if you did not indulge in clown humor.” Jonah already feels incredibly tired, “Yet, I believe that might be hard to achieve, as you are a clown yourself.”

Elias sputters, which is rather amusing for someone who’s just a voice _What the fuck, I hate it when you come out of nowhere with shit like that, give me a content warning next time, damn. What do we have here? I feel a box._

“A better indulgence than clowns.” Jonah does not elaborate and instead cuts the packaging clean open, lifting the lid.

_I know this smell. Jonah is this shoes. This is fresh shoe smell, fuck that much be expensive though, what is this?_

Jonah plucks a pair of heels from the box. “An indulgence.” This sends Elias going batshit crazy, almost falling apart to how he’d first been, just an echoey disjointed kind of spam of words and phrases and the concept of excitement.

Jonah puts the heels on, they’re a matte black, only maybe three fingers tall with a thin heel but a slightly wider end, as he knows he’ll most likely prefer not twisting an ankle so early into owning a young body. Elias finally collects himself enough to bother Jonah to put them on, hold onto a wall, and try. Jonah doesn’t know what ‘try’ entails but complies and wobbles a bit on the way up off the couch.

“I already do not like this and fail to understand how the loss of stability is worth the only mild boost.”

_It’s also a prolific aesthetical choice so I don’t know what you’re complaining about. Didn’t you say Victorian times had you guys wearing heels anyway? This is like a throwback, just snazzy! Hell yeah._

Jonah spends a few hours clopping around his apartment to the ongoing cheer of Elias, until finally sitting down to continue working. Elias fades but periodically chimes in with technological tips like some ever-present assistant. It’s almost irksome but there’s enough benefits that Jonah doesn’t pay much mind.

He does not wear the heels to work the following Monday. He anticipates a certain amount of running is bound to eventually happen. Sometime this month or the next. It’s not an excuse but rather a very reasonable concern. So he wears his usual shoes and plays a podcast on his way to work. Two months pass and the wait is becoming grating, because he _knows_ the worms are there. He just cannot bloody know _when_ they are going to break the silence and come gushing out. He has to be the utmost prepared. The constant worry is putting pain in his neck and shoulders. Elias notices it and also notices the sound of ‘someone eating spaghetti the next room over’ when Jonah is in his office one day. Jonah pauses what he’s doing and sits up, focusing on his surroundings more than he has been. Elias is right, there’s a slow kind of slushing to their left, in the wall. Jonah can feel Elias about to drop some joke about the nature of the sound when he cuts himself off and remarks,

_That’s worms, isn’t it._

Jonah nods, head turned and watching the unremarkable, plain wall. Elias asks him if there’s any visible signs of them and Jonah describes the scene. There isn’t. They sit in silence as Jonah continues working, tenser than ever but aware that, if anything, Elias is very much listening.

Jonah would almost expect the Corruption to begin plaguing his dreams, as he knows the sleepscape is rather reflective of whatever the hell is going on around him. He braces for the impact of insectoid nightmares but it’s mostly unchanged: people he sees on the street on the way home, their flickering faces, and the figure circling the perimeter, always facing directly towards him with torso but walking sideways along an unchanging radius. He’d almost pick the insects.

And then it happens. The walls crumble and he hovers his hand on the fire extinguishers button for just the right amount of time, oh so sweetly aware of Jon thrashing against an attack he thinks will be his last. Is only his first.

Jonah comes down from the adrenaline of running everything smoothly and the elation of finally ridding the institute of worms. He’d do what had to be done, let Jane Prentiss live within the wall – if not in body, then in presence – but he’d much rather not have Elias inform him of worm whereabouts via sound as he sits in his office, pretending like there isn’t several tons of wriggling bodies making their way, unseen, around his brainchild of a building. Elias is still reeling from the rather eventful day, leaving Jonah mostly on his own for the police and ambulance involvement, all the way until he’s walking home and Elias vaguely asks him if they can maybe order pizza. Jonah calls a highly esteemed Italian restaurant as he’s still making his way home, so when they arrive, the pizza’s only a few minutes away. He would never, but he can still smell the unattractive waft of rot and decay and can still hear that soppy churning of living mass. He eats the small pizza in relative silence, feeling like he’s sleepwalking and listening to Elias’ retelling of a sorority party in college where pizza ended up stuck to the ceiling and they paid whoever could eat it off without using their hands a total of ten quid.

_It’s nice to taste pizza and still be able to talk at the same time._

“I doubt anything used to stop you from doing that back when you had control over your mouth and pizza.”

_True. Anyway-_

And it’s kind of unspoken how Jonah sometimes smokes, but mostly just upkeeps the habit of gently smelling the weed he carries. It’s not ideal and it’s been long enough he should probably figure out a better system. Alas. Jane Prentiss is out of their lives and Jonah can comfortably walk in heels now. It’s no big feat, as it’s taken months and they aren’t too impressive either, but he appears at work in them. The combination of everyone’s rattled mental state coupled with a general unfriendliness towards him which he revels in, it goes uncommented on. To be fully honest, it also doesn’t go against his now rather more eccentric aesthetic. He tells this to Elias and Elias laughs about how wearing a single earring and high heels isn’t eccentric, it’s just a bit cooler than whatever the fuck he used to dress in during James Wright’s time. The heels become routine too.

New Year rolls around again and Jonah warrants the holiday, savoring the feeling of loss Jonathan Sims feels at being dismissed from the Archives. He closes up the Institute and moves the papers he still needs working on home, where he sits with the rare ginger latte and works as a podcast plays its blabber in the background, something he’s gotten excessively good at ignoring.

“What if I just Behold a piece of literature and you then retrieve it from my memories, already nice and compact?”

_That means I have to dig through two centuries of whatever the fuck you were up to before I made your life fucking interesting, and I don’t want to do that when I can listen to an audio book._

And so he gets Audible after a tad bit of coercing and lets Elias pick books – so far three of which have been definite jokes: _The Book of Clowns_ by George Speaight (whose name Elias spends more attention laughing and cracking jokes about than he actually does on the whole book), _The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde,_ on which Elias supplies a steady commentary of ‘wow, relatable, for you, that is’, and finally a therapy book on how to deal with the fear of clowns and mannequins. Jonah tells him time and time over that he is not afraid of the Stranger, just averse to it, but Elias does his mental shrug and insists on the audio book to be continued.

Jonah goes to sleep with the audiobooks still playing sometimes. He’s been able to resume his nightly filing of people he passes, working diligently the few hours of shuteye he gets, making sure not one goes unexamined, unremembered. He cannot let someone remain unknown. He’s almost become good at ignoring the person at the horizon who still circles him without missing a night. He’s had to reason to suspect that whatever it is, far away and human-looking and most definitely watching him, is here with bad intentions. It’s seen him unravel and digest the people and mark down their stories so he can Know them, and the figure is yet to make a move. Therefore, Jonah reasons as he’s asleep and within the reaches of lucid dreaming, the figure most likely means no harm, as if it did, it would have come closer long ago. He still wakes up unsettled at times.

A few weeks into the year Elias introduces him to mascara. Jonah orders it once more, using a burner card and account just out of damned paranoia – which Elias lightly jokes about without real malice or judgment – and has it delivered within the day. Strangely enough, yet almost unsurprisingly, there’s muscle memory there when he applies it.

“So you used to wear it every day?”

_Mostly, yeah. It’s a stellar look on this face._

Jonah has to agree. It’s kind of nice, he’s always liked accentuating his eyes and had a profuse hatred for sunglasses. Elias admits that with only occasional descriptive input on the world and himself- well, on Elias Bouchard – he’d been picture the look with some high-waisted slacks ( _which, yes, I know is not the case, I can feel the ones you’re wearing just fine. But I know from very pointed experience that we can really rock some higher waists. With the shirt tucked in)._ Jonah ignores this in favor of informing Elias that he’s spiced the grey and black wardrobe up with green (“No, not lime. Just green”).

Elias is explaining Google Drive’s loopholes to downloading videos with restricted access when Jonah sits bolt upright, hands freezing on the keyboard.

_What?  
What is it, I don’t hear anything._

Jonah stands up, hurriedly muttering, “You know I can’t see into all of the tunnels underneath-”

 _Yes. Did something emerge?_ Elias’ voice is a welcome constant as Jonah bolts from his office, taking vague note of the route he takes – he will need to deal with the footage later – and quietly but very efficiently makes his way down the stairs to where Jon’s office is.

“Not something, someone. Jurgen Leitner.”

Elias pauses briefly before humming a _huh, so he’s alive?_

“Unfortunately.” Jonah doesn’t regret explaining the inner workings of his plan to Elias so he can skip the preamble now, “I need to interfere.”

_There’s a pipe in the storage closet back that no one will miss. At least there should be._

Jonah pauses for a millisecond before taking a sharp turn into the other hallway, away from Jon’s office. “Not exactly what I had in mind,” He whispers under his breath, “But it’ll do.”

_Sorry, god, you’re fucking picky. It’s behind the row of mops, I believe._

It is. Jonah retrieves it and Elias hums confirmation when he feels Jonah’s hand close around the cold metal. Now it’s back down the hallways as he begins to Know that Jon’s skin crawls for a smoke.

_Your steps are loud, walk._

Jonah slows, nodding instead of a verbal answer, forcibly pushing his breath into a normal pattern. He approaches Jon’s office and settles into the shadows. Jon leaves seconds later, already flicking his lighter, and Jonah slinks into the room. Leitner turns around with first surprise and then disdain. Jonah smiles with his teeth.

 _This is fucking disgusting, I’m glad I cannot throw up. I can feel the blood, ew ,ew ,ew there’s some on our neck. Jonah, this is horrible._ Elias supplies a stream of complaints after being rather silent from the moment Jonah enters the room Leitner would meet his demise in. Then there’s a sigh from Elias’ end and he mostly stops, just coming along with Jonah into the private bathroom in his office and scrubbing his arms clean. Jonah trying not to panic. He hasn’t intervened so excessively since Gertrude. And even that was more… impersonal. He’d stood a few meters away. He’d been clean of all blood. But this is not the first person he’s killed, just the first in a long time. But not the first. He tells Elias that much for some reason.

_I know._

And? Jonah almost wants to ask, but there’s police sirens blocks away. He cannot hear them yet but he Knows. The rush of the water in the sink is loud. He changes clothes, schools his expression, and meets the cops. Elias doesn’t chip in much but occasionally throws a vague sound of ‘mmhm’ or just a hum, like he’s there, he’s listening.

He hasn’t had time to check himself in the mirror and while omnipresence tells him that there are no blood splatters anywhere on his person, it is the old anxiety of being scrutinized that rears itself: you take some, you give some, as it goes. He’s half expecting a police officer to point at some obvious arterial artwork left on his face of cuffs, and ask _Who did you kill?_

_Was it that old man? You killed the old man. You killed the old man._

And he’d never say “I did.” He’d make their lives flash before their eyes, unearth the worst of their memories. He’d make them regret ever even looking Jonah Magnus – Elias Bouchard, in the eyes. But they don’t ask that. They ask about the Institute and about Jon and about alibis. And Jonah tells them about the Institute and about Jon and about the cameras. And it is all falling together after coming so close to falling apart. He is let go and immediately sets to doctoring the footage. Sees himself power walking and then jogging through the halls. First without and then with the metal pipe. He sees himself on the small security screen and then he does not. This doesn’t require technological knowledge. This is just power.

Hours later things are as back on track as they can be shoved by Jonah’s meddling. In the long run, Jon’s exposure to one of the police detectives could mark him with the Hunt. Jonah supposes this is rather… acceptable. Or he’d like to suppose. Really, he’s infuriated that something so substantial could slip out from his grasp and escape any semblance of control. Only _damage_ control to be done. He hates that and tells Elias as much, yet there is no reply. Jonah repeats himself and it met with more silence. Right. Time’s passed.

Now, instead of the habitual sniff, he rolls up and blunt and lights it, already home on the couch, somehow, without having paid too close attention. The jitter in his leg abides and he sinks into the couch at an angle he’d usually veto.

“Sorry, I hadn’t noticed.”

_Heya, Jonah. It’s cool, welcome back to-_

“Don’t say clowntown.” Jonah lets his eyes close and head loll back against the couch.

_Actually I was planning on Weed Street but honestly, you stole my thunder. God what a, um, eventful day. Somehow the worm infestation went with less stress. I’m glad my body was never prone to anxiety attacks but, dude, you’re hyperventilating._

Jonah pointedly slows down his breathing, or, a bit more realistically, tries to. “I don’t know why I’m reacting like this. I’ve watched many deaths. Caused many.”

_Stakes, s’pose. And the body’s younger. Emotional deadness and arthritis yet to set in. Give yourself a hug._

Jonah doesn’t react for some time, writing it off as a joke or a jab, but Elias demands again and there’s really not much to do but relent. Jonah places the blunt down in the ashtray and awkwardly and with quite a lot of disdain for the action, wraps his arms around himself. It’s not necessarily nice, but he supposes the body remembers the tail ends of serotonin production and coughs out a few morsels.

_God, we’re touch starved._

“I have abstained from commenting on your rather abundant past of lovers and will recommend you, in turn, abstained from attempting to vicariously live through me.”

_Sorry that you’re old and boring. Also, I figured out that if I could sigh and laugh without adjoined lungs, there’s nothing technically stopping me from reproducing all sorts of noises._

And so Elias begins playing some admittedly relaxing instrumental music right into Jonah’s head at a respectable volume. It only takes twenty minutes of finally relaxing on the couch to realize it’s a slow cover of All-Star. Elias’ music accompanies Jonah through the rather slow yet somehow still eventful months of April and May, as it’s mostly observing Jon get tossed around between all the more pleasant avatars and making sure the police investigation doesn’t take any left turns. Leitner was a hiccup in the grand scheme of the Crowning and Elias fills the silence by coming up with ‘new Leitner books’ now that ‘the man’s dead and someone has to do it for him’. Jonah argues Leitner didn’t actually _come up_ with any of the books and Elias won’t hear it: _Okay, but imagine a Leitner that just makes you sterile. There’s one word in it in comic sans or something._

The Unknowing begins to pick up its pace. Elias stops bringing up clowns in general and listens to Jonah hold toxically polite conversations with police over the phone to shoot down any missing persons cases opened about Jon. When the time comes for Jon to resurface and the group to head out to the Wax Museum, Jonah has a long few days ahead of him and Elias is there, mostly silent, but the intensity of his presence betrays how much he’s paying attention. He says _I smell burning_ around the same time Jonah sits up with the metaphysical pang of destroyed statements. They stand outside of Martin’s door and Elias reasons they could break it, kick it in. He was a student-athlete and Jonah hasn’t been too lenient on growing weak. They could. But Jonah whispers back that no, there’s a danger to Martin and he cannot bare all his more reckless assets here. Cannot show how easy it is to get to him through the intellectual property of his institute. Elias doesn’t object and listens to Jonah retell Martin’s own personal tragedy in a whole new light.

They both sort of feel it when the detonator is set off. Jonah more so than Elias, but his quick smatter of pain sent in Jonah’s direction shows that the reaction must’ve been physical as well, enough for him to notice. They stand in the office and breathe, reaching out to try and understand the state of affairs. Jon is not alive. He shouldn’t be. And so Jonah makes the trip himself, finding his way around the hospital easily and making a statement above Jon’s unmoving body. He’s rounding up when Elias resurfaces:

_Sorry to interrupt but there is police heading down the hallway._

Jonah zones back into reality and indeed. The warning gives him time to prepare and the officers let Jonah go home without so much as comprehending why. Then it’s half a year of waiting. To someone on the cusp of being timeless, it’s not too much. To Elias, stagnating in the darkness of expectation for something with no clear date of culmination, it’s like eternity. He devours podcasts and berates Jonah for pretending he’s dealing with it better than everyone.

“Of course I am, half a year is barely a smidge in my plans. They’ve been in the workings long before you’ve even known about them.”

_Sure, tell that to your horrible sleep and shoulder pain._

He’s not wrong. The dreams are somehow unchanged. It’s no longer unsettling, watching the figure circle him in the distance, but Jonah clings to the rare pieces of normalcy he can get away with after changing hosts and making his fruitful efforts at intractability. And his dreams have been the same for the better part of a century. The new addition isn’t too welcome, even after any lack of activity from its part. And so on a weekend after a drowsy kind of smoking session, Jonah awaits dream lucidity with new plans. He sits up, regaining control of his thoughts and limbs and feeling the dimensions unfold to accommodate the shift in perspective, and instead of working on pinning down the faces of passerbies, he gets up and sets for the figure. It is an excruciatingly long walk and it will be marking the longest Jonah has ever slept.

The closer he draws the more he understands that the person’s been facing their back to him the whole time. But he knows the hair and stature when he sees it: it is himself. It is Elias Bouchard, head of the Magnus Institute. But it’s not. He’s standing differently and he’s wearing what Elias was when James Wright had invited him into the catacombs, bloodstained back where he’d lain on the lone operating table and let it pool at his shoulder blades. Jonah considers waking up. Calls out instead. No words really come out of his mouth – he doesn’t know if he’s ever spoken in a dream before. But the figure turns around none the less:

_Who?_

The voice isn’t matched to the mouth’s movements and echoes so harshly it’s like the man’s spoken fifteen times and not once. It’s followed by a string of ‘ _Me?’s_ and ‘ _I am_ ’s that seem to have no source, and the man blinks at Jonah with eyes that are just that tad bit different.

_Jonah?_

It still echoes but the initial shock of hearing his own, very first name, even after years of Elias calling him by it, is enough to snap him awake in rare cold sweat. Jonah blinks at the sunlight in his room. It’s hours later than he’d ever let himself sleep and he picks himself out of bed in a daze. When Elias is granted access to Jonah’s hearing him, he’s very much there but remains speechless for a while. When he finally makes himself known, Jonah’s calmly cooking lunch – or rather a very late breakfast.

_So, um, you too?_

“I don’t want to verify anything before we can confirm we are talking about the same thing.” He supposes he could’ve been the first to pose the question and it would’ve cut out about forty minutes of radio silence on both ends, which wasn’t unpleasant but could ideally have been avoided.

 _I’ve been dreaming of a blank deserted landscape for years, my only visual input and it’s scenery I cannot look away from._ It’s weird to hear Elias being serious and Jonah focuses on remaining calm on the inhale, measuring his breaths. Elias pauses for a few seconds too long. _Listening to strange noises from somewhere behind me. I think you called my name today. Not any name I’ve ever heard. But I think that was you._

Jonah sets the stove heat on high, “It was.”

Elias conveys the action of nodding slowly. Jonah still isn’t sure how he both does it and makes it understandable without any visuals to go by.

_What does this mean?_

Jonah hates the reality of admittance and remains silent instead of facing a truth that Elias arrives at either way:

_We don’t know, do we._

“A lot of things are going on right now. I cannot afford to make this my sole focus.”

 _Bullshit, it’s a whole lot of waiting is what._

And it becomes waiting for nightfall as well. Because for all that Jonah needs to keep very close eye on, for all the small kegs in his mechanism of the apocalypse, for all the individuals that need to think certain things and act certain ways, Jonah Magnus is always so easily enamored by a simple, new, unexplored mystery. He’d fallen in love with it back when things were just simple ghosts and he was just simple flesh and bone and two eyes. He’d fallen in love and abandoned his other studies in order to chase the unknown and familiarize himself with every nook and cranny. It is two centuries later and old habits die so, so hard.

_Of course, you’re tired of the plan, it’s been brewing for so fucking long! Like watching the same TV show over and over and it’s not even worth a rewatch- a bad TV show on loop for decades._

“My plan is not bad, my plan is very resilient, as you may have noted in light of rather unforeseen yet fixable events.”

_And I’m not saying it is! It’s bloody impressive as shit but also you’ve been stressing over the same end goal for so fucking long, live a little. Indulge in a good quick mystery!_

Jonah hates that Elias is right. Courtesy of a seemingly endless access to Jonah’s thoughts and memories as well as his gradual acclimation to accompanying someone he used to hate the guts of. Jonah stays inside all day, relishing the weekend of all things, and so when he falls asleep, there is no work to be done. Only a silhouette to be followed. This time Elias is facing him but doesn’t seem to acknowledge Jonah's approach until he’s addressed.

 _Oh! So it does work._ The words double over themselves and fold in on each other. _God, this is like learning how to speak again._

Jonah tries to reply but there’s nothing there. Elias looks up at him, he’s young, probably the way he remembers himself, hair unstyled and yet to begin greying, eyes his own and full of that unending sincerity.

 _I’ve seen portraits of Jonah Magnus around the institute._ He voices, words still in dissonance with his mouth as it forms around the syllables a tad too late, _They don’t do you justice._

He says it jokingly, Jonah can tell, in that toothy grin and crinkled eyes, and he ruffles his own wild hair, so delighted for that feeling of movement, of hair under his fingertips that lacks gel and other product. Jonah is familiar with those hands, has been using them for so long now to put his more tedious daily tasks into action. They look different under Elias’ control, relaxed.

 _Well, it seems you’re the one unheard now._ Elias shrugs and Jonah thinks about godforsaken Michael Shelley and his auditory nightmare of attempted speech. _Not too bad, only for a few seconds of sleep. You’ll get the rest of the day to clap back at me._

Elias still seems sown in place, feet unmoving and so Jonah takes some steps closer, putting them at standard conversational distance. As Elias speaks, Jonah begins circling him.

_So you’ve been itchy to solve this one, something new after several iterations of body-hopping, huh? The cat’s back with its addict’s dose of curiosity.  
Right.  
Doubt talking to me will kill you.  
Funny seeing the original you move the way I’ve been feeling our body move for years. If your ritual doesn’t come about and you’re thrown back in the loop of switching personas, I will be so fucking amused if no one catches on. I think I’d recognize you under any guise. You’re just so distinguished. Smarmy fucker. _

Jonah makes his way back around, having not discovered any clues as to why and how Elias just _Is_. It doesn’t seem that he’s in any obvious way attached to the ground. He’s just very stationary. His hands move a lot as he speaks but his legs do not. Jonah wonders what would happen if he were to push him.

 _I don’t know._ Elias shrugs and then excitedly jabs a finger at Jonah, _Aha! I can kind of get what you’re monologuing about. Try thinking about something specific._

Jonah sighs and projects his thoughts towards the usual place Elias resides in his head, picturing the caterpillar-themed cake the archival staff had gotten Jon for his birthday. Elias’ stare goes blank for a moment, just above Jonah’s ear, and it’s an honest relief, a break from being so horribly seen in all of his original, most individual detail. He’d figured that he looked like his first body ever in his dreams but never needed to really confirm it. Now he waits for Elias to stop digging around and he self-consciously rights his rather old-fashioned wear. Something he can’t remember clearly owning but had most likely once belonged to him.

_Um, the birthday cake?_

Jonah nods once, doing his best to look bored and not let the development and better awareness of the new situation make him all jittery. A good mystery has always been his unraveling. Elias was once a good mystery. Now he smiles and crosses his arms in the windless desert and Jonah realizes the lack of a sun even as the black void of ‘up’ has relented to a gray, light kind of sky.

 _Cool, there’s our highly complex and rather bothersome new state of communication! Remind me to ask you when we wake up what the hell it is you do here usually. Because I’ve been curious as all hell about that record-tape on high-speed sound and all those screams. Or you could try to show me now. Either on practice or right here,_ Elias taps a finger against his own temple. His motions are big and lazy and Jonah is so glad that none of Elias’ old friends raised too much hell about his very abrupt shift in body language and a much more uncommented on the shift in eye hue from dull green to a much greyer one.

And Jonah doesn’t want to really show Elias all over again his nightly feeding on the more unfortunate Londoners. He’d always assumed the far-off figure was well aware. He hates to cross the gap once more. But he brings up the slew of memories and general understanding – as he would’ve murdered Elias once (or found a way to) if he was denied the victory of satisfied curiosity. And now that he is asked with the same sparkle of wanting to understand in the eyes of who he used to consider a rather sub-par employee, well, Jonah can’t too much more than oblige. So it goes.

Elias zones out again and Jonah awaits the verdict. He opens his eyes to the ceiling. It is three minutes before his alarm. He doesn’t need to traverse the Institute anymore on the same basis. Peter Lukas is taking over for a time being as a fulfillment of old debts, scoping out his staff and looking for a new avatar. So Elias works on fine-tuning his plans. Taking out people who may be a positive influence on Jon. Finishing the framing of Daisy Tonner as the suspect of anything that could be traced back to himself. It’s time-taking and somehow more boring than mastering Excel. There’s mild feeding there, in the fear of being watched and seen, but it’s not like being in his Institute. It’s not the same. Elias softens the worst of it.

For months, they listen to podcasts on the way to location, and then once earbuds would become rather hindering, Jonah will carefully fold them into his pocket and go on about his business, Elias commonly dropping comments and jokes on the situation and occasionally alerting Jonah to a phantom step of someone behind them that could’ve been missed. He is the failsafe, and Jonah used to talk to himself in the mirror both to heighten self-awareness but also to simulate the feeling of genuine conversation. Now the mirror answers back. Now the mirror listens to Jonah describe locations and people they pass or see on the street, making offhand comments, like he’s seeing them too.

And now Jonah goes to bed earlier, as there’s less to his day without the work hours of being a manager. It’s a tremendous wait, the wait for Jon to make his choices.

He reaches Elias in his dream after working through the slew of strangers from the street. Elias had taken in the fact of Jonah’s consuming of their identities and had been so unfazed it was almost comical. _Hey, Jonah._

_Welcome back to your nocturnal session of muteness. God you look like shit even asleep._

Jonah sends him an angry frown, standing across from Elias with his arms crossed.

_Oh, you absolutely do. No clue how you manage to translate your daily exhaustion into that sweet sweet eighteenth-century vessel of yours but it sure is working. I’m glad this place doesn’t have mirrors or you’d die from making eye contact with your own self._

Elias on the other hand looks healthy. Without that decade of piloting that Jonah had been present for.

_You need to loosen up, go for a jog, those shoulders are going to be the end of me as you refuse to roll them in public and I have to sit there and suffer the tension. When was the last time we had a warm shower?_

Jonah attempts to best portray whatever emotion goes with ‘you bloody well know it doesn’t help much.’

_Yeah, yeah, but I’m running out of options for any activity that you will be up for, that will fix the fucking tension, and that will ultimately not get my canceled if I suggest it._

Jonah sighs and looks out at the barren nothingness of dreaming.

Jonah wakes up and Jon still will not. He is beginning to feel the wretched buzz under his skin, almost like withdrawal all over again but he can’t pin it now, as he’s not been avoiding weed at any point. His appetite remains in its rather mild consistency, but he does get more wound up. It’s like the last decade is weighing down on his new shoulders as he has to sit like a waiting duck and not intervene with Jon’s marking of the End. It’s miserable. Elias buzzes around in his head about how he’s the best possible candidate for an avatar of the end anyway, just too bad he’s dead. Jonah sits in the cab on the way home from more meddling and studies his hands in his lap as he periodically taps out a _yes_ or a _no_ to Elias. They’re familiar now, as he’s assimilated well into being Elias Bouchard, but he also remembers seeing them when asleep, carefree and lively.

It is very weird indeed when Elias claps him on the shoulder when dreaming. They haven’t necessarily touched, Jonah realizes, and marks it down as a missed opportunity for study. Elias draws his hand back, staring at it, losing whatever it was he was saying.

 _Huh, so we’re both real-ish here. Or both equally unreal as to allow for contact._ He smiles at Jonah, _I’m surprised you’re not all over this testing out your theories yet._

Jonah is surprised too. He shrugs, lacking much else to give, and sticks his hand out in a handshake. Jonah’s original hands have always been rather small, the type that would look good holding a quill and writing one’s fate. Elias claps their palms together, the handshake firm and rather startling. It’s strange to touch someone. Elias must be feeling the same. He lets Jonah shake his hand for a few moments and then tightens his grip and pulls, shorter but stronger than Jonah, and hugs him.

It’s… It is far more than a simple, dejected ‘interesting’. Jonah has never been touched in such excess, and even whoring himself out for the Lukas bank account, he’s always been strictly professional. Jonah wakes up and thinks about it a lot.

Elias requests an audiobook of Dante and this one, Jonah actually listens along with. He’s always had an appreciation for the madman and it’s a work that may lost a lot if simply Understood and not experienced. He explains passages to Elias on their way across the city to track down more potential pawns.

He does jog a few times on Elias’ consistent complaints, listening to Dante or spacing out to a podcast. Sometimes he describes what they pass to Elias but the jogging doesn’t help much, only makes him more tired. He looks at himself in the mirror before showering and fixes his posture point by point. Shoulders straighter, smooth face down more, relax arms a little, smile- he does it with his teeth now, a grin that he knows his staff hates for unpinnable reasons. He loves it.

Elias whines about the shoulders again. Telling him to drop it and relax if he’s at home. Jonah bickers right back, still facing the mirror and very much feeling like he’s telling off an older Elias. Jonah relents and rolls his shoulders as he steps into the shower.

_It’s just waiting. That’s all we’re doing. Sitting around and waiting and that’s why you’re miserable._

Jonah sighs as he sinks into bed, once more, slumber, lucidity, and then the walk to Elias. He does not know why he still does it. Hates not knowing, but understands if he were to go digging now, he’d find things he doesn’t want to face. There’s the buzz of something back in his bones, the feeling like he’s forgetting something – maybe in his plans? And Elias tells him he’s not, because two heads are better than one but, well, they kind of do share one, and yes Jonah don’t say anything.

_Jonah, Jonah, Jonah._

He ruffles Jonah’s hair and Jonah swats at his hand as Elias talks, talks, and then makes Jonah participate in a ‘secret handshake’. It’s horrid and Jonah thinks about his own hands – or Elias Bouchard’s hands – for days to come.

He finally buys the high-waisted slacks and when they’re delivered Elias has a very short yet rather disorienting rave in Jonah’s head. He immediately requests to have them tried on- _and yes, tuck your shirt in, fuck, hell yeah. Describe them._

“A deep, dark green - think pine forest - three visible golden buttons at the waist-” Jonah traces them with his fingers to show where they are, “- no real pockets, rather well fitted.”

_I wanna Behold it._

“Don’t avatar terminology,” Jonah mumbles and sighs almost automatically, “Where do you want to start?”

 _Collar, and then move down, I need to know what outfit we’re rocking the world in._ He then laughs merrily and Jonah can almost see his sunshine grin, _That’s like your seventeen thousandth question, you owe me so many fucking favors._ He’s not serious but Jonah will play along.

He traces his fingers around the collar of his lighter button-up, standing in his living room and staring at the floor-to-ceiling windows. “I want to see a detailed account of all questions asked in order to verify that amount.” He traces his hands over his shoulders next.

 _Yeah, let me pull up after-life Excel._ Elias sounds mildly distracted, paying attention to the outfit in equal measure as Jonah moves down to touch each separate cuff and the included eye-themed cufflink.

“After-life Excel is just Google Sheets or Charts or whatever but your wifi is bad and your laptop is on fire.” Jonah sighs and starts moving his hand down his shirt’s buttons, not undoing them, simply letting Elias observe.

Rather unexpectedly, this kicks a very loud and very un-hindered laugh from Elias. Jonah pauses in his ministrations as Elias begs for him to wait, voice beginning to fall apart momentarily as he fails to get himself together. The reverb is back and Jonah closes his eyes as he waits for Elias to finish laughing, “It wasn’t that funny.”

_Don’t be mean to yourself, it just catches me way off guard when you make good jokes. Sorry, you can continue._

Jonah looks down at himself, making sure he’s kinetically met every feature of the button up. He absently reaches his hand up to acknowledge another one of his new dangle earrings and lightly pat his head of hair so Elias can get the style.

_Mm, I’m liking the aesthetic so far, still pretty tame, but all in all sexy enough to bring about the apocalypse._

Jonah’s face flares red for a moment, “The Watcher’s Crown need not be summoned with sexy outfits.”

_Do too! Come on, give me your ‘you’ve been played for a fool’ line!_

“I will not have a ‘you have been played for a fool’ line in my parting speech, who do you take me for?” Jonah shakes his finger at empty air but knows Elias can feel it. He traces where the shirt is tucked into his new pants, “Anyway. Fine, here: You’ll get used to it here, in the world that I have made.”

_Mm, the waist’s high as hell, fuck yeah. And dude you gotta smile when you deliver that, I’m not getting the full bastard energy I’ve seen from you._

Jonah flattens his hands on his hips, the pants really are rather form-highlighting, he smiles the way he’s adapted, “You’ll get used to it here, in the world that, hm, we have made.”

_Oh, much better, smile more, you make it so greasy and unpleasant, plus ten sexy points._

It does sound different curved by a smile and Jonah runs his hands down the outside of his thighs, bending at the waist until he can finish the motion at his ankles. He tries his best not to think about Elias’ hands, because that would be rather ridiculous, would it not? They are his own and they have been his own for rather long. And they had been warm and strong in the dreamscape. And he can still faintly feel the buzz of rare full-bodied contact. Jonah tries not to think about it, running his hands down his legs again on Elias’ request to better understand the pants.

He isn’t touched by people often, including himself, and it makes him break out in bitter disgust on the best of days. This is not interesting, this is rather inconvenient, that later when Jonah showers the same night, he is hyper-aware of his own skin.

The slow gaining of lucidity, the shifting of the sky from nothing to something. The walk to Elias. Dreaming has never been so infuriating. He’d rather walk Dante’s circles of hell through and back, and yet he walks towards Elias’ figure in the distance and invites him out of whatever customary trance of either standing in place or aimlessly walking that he’s by default in. Elias turns to him and he’s grinning and asking if Jonah has enough control over his own dreaming to manifest the new outfit right there and then. Jonah wrinkles his nose, and points first to himself and then to Elias with a raised eyebrow.

 _Yes, on yourself, not on me, how would I look at it then? Don’t give me that stare, you know I’m excited about clothes because we’ve lost years to boring black suits!_ He laughs again and Jonah fights to not smile along. He concentrates and tries not to stare at Elias’ hands as he rewrites the fabric of his dream to feature the new pants and the button-up from earlier today, then dons the extra accessories. Jonah looks down at himself, and that’s right. His rather old Victorian getup has been replaced by what he’s worn the same morning.

Elias claps, _Oh, lovely! Give me a twirl._

Jonah, trying to channel the utmost exasperation, does as asked. He can feel his face burning at the notion of being purposefully regarded and studied, almost as if under a microscope. He hasn’t felt so horribly seen in ages, not since he aligned with the eye. The closest to come had maybe been Gertrude, but that was all fear of being discovered. This is different. This is the fear of being known. This is the fear of hearing Elias say his real name so fondly. This is the fear of genuine company. It is a fear that manifests as Elias cheers the outfit once more and sets to comb Jonah’s hair down with his hands for ‘the aesthetic’. And Jonah curses being silenced in this nightmare realm, feeling the ends of Elias’ fingers running down his scalp in vivid foreignness, and then finding himself standing far too close, and Jonah does not know – and never will – who leans in first.

He wakes up far before the licks of sunrise can pain his room, snaps his eyes open in the dark and feels a horrible kind of cavity yawn in his chest at the memory of lips on his own. Jonah, in the dead dark, scrambles for the weed on his bedside table, Knowing where it is before he even begins to guess. He’s shaking with a caged kind of energy, no outlet, only a tremor in his hands and Elias’ presence finally breaking into his life.

_Jonah?_

Jonah lies in the dark, eyes wide and seeing nothing but shadowed walls.

_Jonah, we are going to have to prevent that from happening in the future._

Jonah, for a very horrible moment, thinks Elias means the kiss. A rebuttal comes instantly.

_No, the surprise-you’re-awake-now thing, god….  
I doubt you’ll go back to sleep easily now, huh?_

Jonah, on established instinct, taps a _yes._ Elias chuckles in his head and it’s lower now, it makes Jonah’s skin crawl, and – confusingly enough – not in a bad way. “You must understand,” he practically mouths, “I, for all my endless existence, am rather out of my depth.”

Elias becomes heavily more prominent in Jonah’s head, almost like when he’d first been discovered and had flooded Jonah’s mind with so much presence that it could’ve caused whiplash. It’s slower now, a gradual sort of draping, like being engulfed by a blanket. _I’ve looked around, for which I will not apologize as you too are a voyeuristic motherfucker, and it looks like you haven’t indulged in touching yourself not only throughout the possession of myself but most vessels beforehand._ Elias somehow gives this the quality of being spoken right by Jonah’s ear, which is damning and sends shivers racing down his neck and arm.

“I’ve slept around.”

 _For money and with little enthusiasm._ Elias hums, and he can no doubt feel the same burn of blush on Jonah’s face. _Let’s try this. Count as a favor if it makes you feel better. I’ll tell you what to do, if you don’t like it after ten minutes is up, you have full rights to stop._

Jonah is finding it rather difficult to breathe, taps a _yes._

_Wonderful. Close your eyes, imagine I’m riiight there, yeah?_

Jonah obliges, getting briefly lost in the sensation of a dreamt kiss all over again. He’s got the pillowcase clamped tight in his left fist and Elias instructs him to move his right hand down, down, along his chest like he had when showing the outfit. _Which you looked stunning in, by the way, god you’re pretty, Jonah. Thought that when I first turned around to see you, but you don’t make ignorance easy, you nasty Eye avatar, bringing things to the forefront all the time._

Jonah gulps, letting his hand dance down to his pajama pants, becoming very aware of the rather unusual phenomena of an erection. There’s the memory of Elias’ own hands over him in the dreamscape and he dips his fingers under the waistband, unprompted. The ache in his bones and under his skin is ever-stronger and Elias’ voice in his head drowns out the world. _You’re fucking horrible, and you know it, know that you’re horrible and fuckable, but at the same time so repulsive people do double-takes when they wake up from dreams of you- yes, I know about that too, I’ve been looking, I’ve been looking at you Jonah. I want you to touch yourself._

“What a divergence from your normal demeanor, Elias.” Jonah bites out, so incredibly convinced, at the end, this is all some scheme. “If I’d known you were capable of such demeaning words I would’ve invited you to write my apocalypse monologue with me.” He has to say it into the depth of his pillow: words cannot exist right now into the open air.

 _You wouldn’t have to, I was there either way-_ Jonah closes his – Elias’ – hand around his dick and it’s so consumingly new, doing this to himself in a dark room without the need to smile and speak well so that the institute can pay its next property rent. Elias retracts momentarily, rolling with the same spike of pleasure, and then doubles down full force, his occupancy in Jonah’s mind like spilling a boiling tub of water, _You’ve forgotten you’re Jonah, haven’t you, lost yourself in the plan and in the many faces, my own included, how horrible to be so seen, no? Start stroking, hold harder._

Jonah begins moving his hand, involuntarily curling into himself with a twitch as his abdominal muscles contract, keeping the grip loose for now, stubborn enough to resist basic directions. Elias notices and growls- god, Jonah knew he used to hold a rather long string of lovers, but he’d never indulged to find out exactly the angles of Elias’ mind. Never thought he’d meet them. The tingling is only getting worse, a searing kind of fire that seems to be emerging from his core, and Jonah starts whining, lightly and directed deep into his pillow.

 _Never bothered to indulge in carnal pleasures, did we? Hopped into older bodies, got overconsumed with work, tragic. I’d been riding backseat for years wondering why you never jerked off, thought you were on the asexual spectrum, but no there’s history before your whoring out with the Lukases,_ Elias murmurs into his ear and Jonah pumps harder, toes curling under the blankets and struggling to inhale where he’s got his face pressed into the bed. _There’s history, you used to like this, engage in it, but secretly, yes, scary to be seen isn’t it?_ Elias’ voice is beginning to develop that echo of lost control, he’s breaking apart much like how Jonah feels, muscles corded with fire. _Couldn’t buy heels from a mall because it’s scary to be looked at and seen, yes? Tell me._

“Yes,” Jonah pants out into the night air, lifting his face for air, hand beginning to stutter.

_Mm, I thought I wouldn’t push you but you’ve been so bloody difficult. Going around all tense and horny and trying to deny it, horrible having someone in your head just observing you without the ability to hide, huh?_

“Yes, yes,” Jonah growls and it’s all Elias’ voice either way, just different intonation, his hand tight around his dick and inexperienced – but like with the mascara, muscle memory kicks in and Jonah keens, increasingly sure he will die if he burns any hotter, the surge of heat through all his limbs beginning to come into a center point in his abdomen. Elias echoes badly, but still there, hot and heavy, _Scary to have me look at you, use your name. Faster._

Jonah complies frantically, sweating against his bedsheets and feeling his legs tense beyond belief, just a few more strokes-

_I see you, Jonah._

He comes with a sob that’s punched out of him rather than pulled, jerking bodily and gasping for air, feeling his muscles immediately flood with a heavy sense of exertion. Elias loses verbality, fading into a kindled warmth and a pleasant buzz. They lie there, panting in the cover of night and trembling, before it subsides in a long-needed relaxation. This is better than any high, Jonah thinks, as it releases the long-cemented tension in his shoulders and erases the itch under his skin. He needs to stand up, clean himself, his alarm will ring eventually. But as Elias returns with a calm _I’ve missed that_ and fades back into nothing, all Jonah can do is fall back asleep. He doesn’t dream of anything.

It is terrifying how little changes between them.

It’s the same podcast, the same cooking, the same stalking of London’s streets to follow and assess anyone with potential roles in the unraveling of the world. Between them, the alterations are minimal, but Jonah spends too many waking moments caught on what has transpired. Caught on the burn of satisfaction and the memory of Elias’ lips. This is not the time, not the place, to get comfortable, so Jonah walks to him in his dreams and collects himself in the mornings and they learn to fool around without Jonah being startled awake. They finish Dante’s inferno. They walk down the streets briskly and they meet the new year watching a wide expanse of colorful sky from the apartment as Jonah pauses in finalizing the papers that will grant Jon’s legal wellbeing when… if… he awakes. Sitting in the sea of reference paper with haphazard notes and the actual legal, clean copies, Elias points out typos, having learned to tell not only what Jonah types but also spells. Jonah argues that the spelling is valid, just old. Elias argues that the spelling was valid when it was the old times, and is, therefore, no longer.

It is a miserably cold week in February and Jonah stops flat in his steps when he feels Jon begin to breathe again somewhere in a hospital bed. Elias whoops in his head and they make a U-turn. Things are about to speed right back up. The main pawn is back in the game and Jonah has been itching to play.

_I reckon you can return back to the Institute, better vantage points._

“Everywhere is a vantage point for us.” Jonah taps his pen against his lip, replying to real-life physical mail that some of his more distinguished allies prefer. “Peter isn’t done with Martin.”

_He could take Martin on some side-mission into the Netherlands, I don’t know. Why am I making plans? I’m just here to listen to the news and give you a sense of humor._

“Good point, but I also need his better favors. And no one’s making you make plans, I can put a podcast back on.”

_No, it’s cool, I’ll go back to digging through your traumatic childhood._

“I’d rather you do not unearth that which even I have forgotten,” Jonah smiles despite himself, knowing that Elias hasn’t extended his presence to riffle around Jonah’s brain and has simply settled into the back of his head.

Jonah reabsorbs himself back into writing and Elias only returns with a concise, sharp, _Someone’s walking up to our door._

And so begin the visits of Basira and Daisy into Elias Bouchard’s life, causing both the individuals who make up Elias Bouchard to quicken their plans on having Daisy under severe investigation. The ex-detectives mostly turn up to try and catch Bouchard off-guard, which doesn’t take long to connect to something or another Jon is doing in the Archives. Another distraction. The third time they come over to investigate, Elias sends a quick _I got this, just zone out._ And somehow Jonah understands.

So Jonah begins to project his powers, seeking to learn Jon’s activities, as Elias pays attention to the conversation and swaps in his more sophisticated vocabulary and tells Jonah what to say. Jonah parrots the words he hears, barely turning them any attention, and tracks down the Archives on his mental map, beginning to hone in on Jon’s whereabouts. He is rifling through Bouchard’s office. Jonah snaps back to attention, parroting the last thing Elias says, and draws a quick question mark on his own palm, out of sight.

_They’re engaging in follow-ups about a sighting of the Loch, bloody, Ness._

Jonah has to stop himself from sighing at the distraction tactic. Soon after, Jon and Basira are off to Ny-Ålesund. Daisy is busy dodging her former coworkers. Peter and Martin are doing whatever the hell. Jonah dreams and Elias is a good kisser. The date draws ever closer.

 _I hate you, Jonah._ Elias says as he holds him in the dreamscape, sucking hickeys that never appear into his neck. _I deeply hate that you have enamored me so completely._

Jonah cannot do anything but lie in the grasp and enjoy the ministrations, feel himself be manhandled into different positions on Elias’ lap as he goes to nose at alternate sides of Jonah’s neck. _The day you lose most ties to everything is soon._ And Jonah can hear something under the residual hatred.

So when he wakes up and invites Elias back into his life, he tells himself in the mirror, “I cannot predict what will happen of my physical form with the Crowning. However, I can assume that, since I have not degraded into a rather unpleasant form like a lot of other avatars, not many things will be altered.”

_Assuming makes an ass_

“Out of you and me, yes.” Jonah strips his pajamas and climbs into the shower, “Yet I do not find myself… necessarily in need of severe physical or… as it goes, mental changes.” It is a vague way to put it and Jonah copes Elias will not dig.

Elias does. _Oh, how wonderfully cryptic of you. Which, is to say, I am not heavily surprised by the inconclusiveness of the statement._

“Don’t mock me with fancy language, Elias.” Jonah soaps up his shoulders, “I know deep down there’s only air in that consciousness of yours.”

_That’s so rude and absolutely unfair and you are a horrible bully._

Jonah smiles without much care, eyes closed under the pour of water. “You deserve it, after explaining to me the plot of every Star Wars film, I’m inclined to be of more violent disposition.”

 _You were refusing to Behold the plot so someone had to do the job, sorry I don’t make the rules,_ there’s an audible smiles in Elias’ mockery and it’s rather disarming over only the sound of his voice. _At least I don’t catch you up on every singly podcast episode I listen to._

“That would take years as you do consume rather a lot.”

_Hm, on that topic, let’s go see Venom before everything goes to shit, it’s coming out soon._

“I don’t see why you’d enjoy listening to an action movie.”

_I parting gift in case the crowning dislodges me from this eternity for good._

Jonah frowns and rinses his hair, “I do not believe the Crowning will have that effect.”

_You just said you couldn’t even begin guessing as to what will happen. It’s one movie, it won’t kill you._

Jonah sighs, “I know it won’t, what will in the end be my demise is your affinity to convincing me human indulgence is a good idea.”

 _I’ll repeat that back at you when you fall asleep and come to my spot of lucid exile. Simulate the loss of my influence in your life._ Elias is bitter, it’s there under his smooth-talk. Jonah has seen far too much of every type of person, maybe a bit less of Elias’ caliber and situation, but enough. He’s bothered by the potential of another death after his first. Jonah frowns once more, washing his face free of residual shampoo and leaves it at that. There is a lot ahead of them. Elias doesn’t say shit when Jonah seeks him out in sleep.

Jonah walks into his Archives without hindrance from the Hunt’s avatars going at each other’s throats or the Stranger’s thing elbowing its way through the hallways. He describes what he sees to Elias and Elias emits a low whistle, beginning to fade what Jonah recognizes – or rather quite unfortunately Beholds – is music from Mission Impossible. It is, somehow, a good anchor to keep his collected cool as he lowers into the system of tunnels, following where he knows Peter and Martin are. He doesn’t tell Elias to cut it out and the music fades on its own as Bouchard walks into the Panopticon. A lot will be decided this day. Decades of build-up. Martin is a wild-card of moderate predictability and Peter isn’t an issue at all. Elias speculates on how this all could’ve been ruled out earlier and Jonah just settled with the slightly longer run once he figured out how to relieve tension.

Jonah does not blush, plays his part, does it well, and greets Jon when he inevitably stumbles down here. Lets him go into the Lonely.

_Think he’ll make it?_

“Infatuation is capable of great feats of character.”

_I don’t think that’s ‘infatuation’._

“You’re free to think whatever you want, dear,” Jonah smiles as he understands Peter’s death has just come to pass. He waits until Jon finds Martin and nods to himself, “Looks like I was right.”

_I bet they used the L-word, Jonah._

“Sucks to not have access to omniscience, Elias. We have a lot to clean up.” And Jonah heads out of the tunnels. The boys can find their way to faux-safety for now. He needs to settle an institute worth of debacle. It takes three days to effectively, and without the dramatics that Jon’s conditioning required, eradicate the side effects of his plan’s penultimate step. Next is one letter. One statement. Next is the end of _this_ world and the beginning of Theirs. At half-past noon the Magnus Institute is contained and calm once more. It is oh so easy to get things done when you aren’t playing nice. Jonah slumps into his office chair, one he’s been separated from for far too long. The leather welcomes him back and the desk is familiar.

_Is that painting of you from back when you were, well, the YOU you, is that still in the office?_

Jonah doesn’t have to crane his neck, simply aware that _Jonah Magnus_ in all his aged glory is on the wall, oil on canvas. “Yes.”

_Still a laughing wonder no one’s figured it out. Well. We’re almost done._

“Indeed. And yet the last stretch can be the more dangerous. No space for relaxation, as someone who used to partake in school sport, I shouldn’t have to tell you to lose pace with the finish line yet in sight.”

_Thank you very much, I more than PARTOOK in sports, I was rather a son to be proud of._

“If only there was anyone to be proud of you.”

_Likewise, old man._

Jonah smiles, rolling his neck, “Well deserved.”

_Well earned.  
How long will we be waiting?_

“I’ll give them a few weeks. Recuperate. After all, I’ve never had Jon’s demise as my goal. Only his ascension.”

_Very noble. So I’m supposing less running around, a bit more leisure time._

“If this is about taking you to Venom, I’ll think about it.”

Elias chuckles, _Wow, no actually! Thanks for the reminder. I was going to propose you take a break from walking around and shouting at people all day._

“I don’t shout, I forcibly instruct,” Jonah argues but there’s no more real argument _in_ it, just the tradition of standing his ground and maybe smiling a little tiny bit.

_Of course, of course, fundamentally different. Your nobility knows no end and your grip on this institute is both stern and guiding, have I said everything yet?_

“Forgetting the part on how my apocalypse aesthetic is, reportedly, rather well-prepared.”

_It is, seven high-waisted pants in and a new ear piercing, how could I object, Jonah you are rather stunning. Strange complementing the vessel we coinhabit, but it seems that your take on the presentation and manner of such is exceptional. Not without my guidance, of course._

“Of course. Of course. Fundamentally.” Jonah traces swirls in his thigh, lazily watching the dip in fabric, “I’d still be in loafers if not for such divine interference. And to think you wanted me to wear loafers barefoot… I’m glad you’ve grown as a person.”

Elias rolls a deep, slow laugh, humming, _I don’t think I have. Difficult to grow when you are reportedly rather short._ His voice is grave and Jonah knows it’s technically the same voice he himself speaks with, but it’s all about the wielder, not the sword, and Elias has years of frivolity up his sleeve. That, and a rather damning encyclopedic understanding of Jonah’s buttons. _But I suppose in a ghostly sense, I’ve developed a rather interesting array of abilities. I’m still adamant that the End is involved here._

Jonah sighs and undoes the top two buttons of his shirt, involuntarily running his fingers down the column of his neck. Elias hums. “I do wish I could regret your continued understanding of the Dread Gods. Would prevent me from having to hear slander like this. Far from merited.”

_You’ve done a selection of things I can confirm have made you hands-down rather fitting for mental onslaught._

“Boo hoo, little poor me,” Jonah toys with the buttons of his pants, contemplating the pros and cons of humoring Elias and his own vague desires. “All I’ve ever done wrong was- hm, I cannot think of a single instance.” He can feel Elias about to speak up and snakes his hand into his trousers instead, effectively muffling all of Elias’ possible protests with a firm grip on his already partially hard dick. He works himself to a full erection slowly, feeling every time Elias attempts to begin a sentence and just as quickly loses his thread.

He finally manages, already beginning to echo, _I regret introducing you to such biological warfare._

“You didn’t introduce me to anything,” Jonah grits out as to keep quiet, “You’ve simply… convinced me to proceed. Forget not who is the elder.”

 _Forget not who’s muscle memory we’re working with._ Elias resonates within his head, so pleasant in his slow roll over Jonah’s mind. This is an excellent taste of salvation and Jonah bites his lip to keep quiet, knowing Elias feels the pain of it too. Works them both as neither really have much more to add, lost in the sensation of pleasure after a hard few weeks. In the setting’s nature, it’s all the more exciting. Jonah knows the door is unlocked. Also trusts to Know if anyone even thinks of approaching. Yet the thrill is there, red-faced and pumping his own dick, facing the closed door of his office. Elias engulfs his mind in warm understanding and begins a faint chant of _Jonah Jonah Jonah Jonah_ like the ideal worshipper with no other saints in sight. The name, the way he pronounces it, carelessly but so familiar, Jonah digs his hand into the chair’s armrest and grits out: “I don’t want to get rid of you.”

Elias moans and it shatters into a million echoes.

“And I won't’. When the Coronation happens. I won’t. I can’t.” And Jonah makes him fucking _understand_ that the _can’t_ isn’t because he’s incapable of it. But rather because he _does not ever want to._ Elias stutters in the space within their head and somehow conveys a feverish nod, _Nosy bitch._

“Short dumbass.”

Jonah pumps faster, his toes curling in his shoes, legs beginning to shake from tension. When he comes it’s as quiet as they can make it, shuddering out a breath that’s just far away off enough from a whimper to remain unheard by the greater world. 

Jonah doesn't process any strangers in his dream and walks towards Elias as soon as his limbs begin to listen. Call to him, which will be the only thing he can intone while sleeping, it seems. Elias turns and greets him and peppers him with kisses, calling him horrible names. He gathers Jonah up and holds him, and Jonah will never smile contentedly, he will sometimes punch at Elias' chest if he gets too handsy, or he will frown and level him with the coldest stare possible, yet all done from pressed rather close to Elias' chest. The unchanging weather paints Elias to be colorful and lively and Jonah wonders if he will get to dream after the Crowning at all. So he relishes it. Listens to Elias talk about the way he'd enjoyed learning history as a kid. Jonah nods sometimes, absently tracing patterns into Elias' chest. Even when Jonah knows all this information on default, Elias' voice is deep and soothing, especially with one ear pressed to his ribs. 

Elias looks down at Jonah then, smiling for once closed-lip, but so, so wide that his eyes are almost fully closed with how much his face scrunches up. Jonah tries to best convey a 'what?' and Elias kisses his forehead, then leans down and waits for Jonah to close his eyes before kissing each eyelid.

_No matter how ironic, Jonah, for all your physical and mental magnificence, your eyes, in their own way, are rather beautiful too._

The fake statement is written. The summoning, too. The fate of their future world no longer rests in their hands. First, it rests in the hands of Basira, then the UK postal service. (And now they wait for the delivery to do its job. They move all their needed belongings to the Institute in preparation for its becoming as the great all-seeing tower, the pinpoint of the world’s turning. And then it’s more waiting. So Jonah takes them to see Venom. It’s strange. It’s a bit familiar and Elias laughs about it for a long time.) Then in the hands of a Scottish mailman, and then finally, in the hands of Jonathan Sims. Elias and Jonah sit within the institute and the smile that creeps onto their face is small, private, just for the two of them. And they listen and Jon begins to read.

It is the best moment of their lives as two halves of the one man that the world sees. And soon the world really will become all about Seeing. And they watch the sky begin to churn colors, the afterimage of fireworks, the echo of fractured minds, the oncoming storm of every fear, which at the center of all they will take their rightful throne.

You’ll get used to it here, in the world that we have made.

The sky breaks apart and opens its eyes. Jonah Magnus grins with all his pretty, celebrity teeth and looks back, challenging it to throw him off the pedestal and knows it will not. And then as everything bleeds away into a demented, twisted version of itself, where nothing will ever be straightforward again, Jonah tentatively reaches out, aware that so many variables have just been tossed to the wind, that it is only a matter of chance that some never come down.

“You still there?”

It is a horrible wait and a worse silence – even as the outside erupts in gleeful fear. It is the kind of silence that only Jonah Magnus has ever felt. It is the one he fears most.

“Elias?”

And then it is like the dam gives in, pouring a slew of panicked pain into Jonah’s brain, stringing up the worst headache he’s had since inhabiting Elias Bouchard and choosing a blunt over bearing withdrawal. It paints the insides of his skull with bright vivid adrenaline, and then, and then, and then, it abates. Replaced with mild confusion, and then a deep, immobile kind of love.

 _I am._

**Author's Note:**

> this exists because a friend whom i love dearly deserves all the inconvenience i hope to bring them by writing this


End file.
